Conclusion

Summary

Descended from a long line of lawyers and magistrates, Fielding's family background placed him firmly within the ranks of the nobility and gentry who made up the ruling class of England. It is therefore scarcely surprising that his heritage should have influenced his mature social and political thought regardless of the extensive financial exigencies in which he found himself throughout his adult life largely as a consequence of his spendthrift nature. This, in itself, might be thought to add up to a sufficient explanation of the conservative solutions to the nation's problems put forward in all seriousness in the series of pamphlets he published on crime and society after he became a reforming magistrate at Bow Street. Concluding that ‘the Constitution of this Country is altered from its antient State’, he seems to have been perfectly serious in his attempt ‘to rouse the CIVIL Power from its present lethargic State’. At the root of his anxiety was the alteration he perceived in the ‘Order of People’ he called ‘the Commonalty’ who ‘by Degrees’ had become less deferential to and more independent of ‘their Superiors’. While he repeatedly insisted that it was ‘only the inferior Part of Mankind’ that he had ‘under consideration’, his concerns encompassed the whole of society for the reasons given in An Enquiry Into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers. ‘In solemn Truth, there is nothing of more serious Consideration, nor which more loudly calls for a Remedy, than the Evil now complained against’, he maintained. ‘For what can be more worthy the Care of the Legislature, than to preserve the Morals, the Innocence, the Health, Strength and Lives of a great Part (I will repeat, the most useful Part) of the People’?

Throughout his writing career Fielding repeatedly voiced his concerns about ‘the Manners, Customs, and Habits of the People, more especially of the lower Sort’, which he believed had been undermined as a consequence of an alteration in the balance of wealth and power within the state.