Abstract

This study is an examination of Henry Fielding's attitude toward the uses and abuses of language in the four newspapers which he edited: The Champion , The True Patriot , The Jacobite's Journal , The Covent Garden Journal . This exploration begins with a consideration of Fielding's attitude toward the corrupting and corruptible word and the relationship which he saw between the corruption and decline in language and the corruption and decline in ethics and morality. It focuses on these four journals largely neglected by previous Fielding critics, searching them for references to language uses and abuses and for the social theory underlying these remarks. This study moreover traces and investigates Fielding's seventeenth-century philosophical forerunners--Thomas Hobbes, Bernard de Mandeville, Anthony Ashley Cooper Third Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke--and their profound effect on Fielding's ethos end ethics in particular and on those of the eighteenth century in general. Locke is discussed in most detail because he directly shaped Fielding's attitude toward language. ;Because language is a major tool of certain learned professions, three chapters examine Fielding's position in his journals on the uses and abuses of language as related to three groups of professionals: the clergy, writers and critics, and lawyers and doctors. ;This study suggests further areas needing investigation: critical editions of The Champion and The Covent Garden Journal, a comparative study of Fielding's journalistic efforts with those of Addison, Steele, Defoe, and especially Swift, an examination of Fielding's attitude toward women in the four journals, an exploration of the philosophical relationship between Fielding and Locke, a comparison of Fielding's theories of language and society with those of two modern linguist-philosophers--George Orwell and Walter Ong. ;Fielding attempted in his four journals to restore a language that he saw as fallen into corruption and abuse. Language, he thought, often becomes corrupt first; then the corruptions in society follow. Fielding's four journals provide particularly useful indications of how seriously he took language, how prevalent he found its abuses in the professions of mid-eighteenth-century England, and how he hoped through purifying language to reform society itself in his own time