When the keepers of gambling houses dared to fly at such high game as the person of the Lord Chancellor, there is no wonder that the safety of his Majesty's ordinary lieges was of small account. "Robbery," writes Horace Walpole, a few weeks before the date of the above letter, "is the only thing which goes on with any vivacity." And at the close of the year a Royal Proclamation was actually published, promising £100 over and above other rewards, and a free pardon, to any accomplice who should apprehend offenders committing murder, or robbery by violence, in London streets or within five miles of London, providing such an accomplice had not himself dealt a mortal wound. So startling a confession of impotence on the part of the Government served very fitly to introduce the pamphlet, then on the eve of publication. And if further proof be needed of the conditions of public safety at the beginning of the year 1751, it may be seen in the passage of the King's Speech delivered at the opening of Parliament on the 17th of January, in which his Majesty exhorted the Commons to suppress outrages and violences on life and property; words representing, of course, the policy of the Ministry.
The title of Fielding's little book, dedicated to Lord Hardwick, and published about January 22, is An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers &c. with some Proposals for remedying this growing Evil. In which the Present Reigning Vices are impartially exposed; and the Laws that relate to the Provision for the Poor and to the Punishment of Felons are largely and freely examined. The Enquiry opens with a powerful denunciation of the licence then allowed to the three great causes, in Fielding's opinion, of the increasing demoralisation of the 'most useful Part' of the people. These were, first, the immense number of places of amusement, all seducing the working classes to squander both their money and their time; this being "indeed a certain Method to fill the Streets with Beggars and the Goals with Debtors and Thieves." Here, in Fielding's view, new legislation was demanded. The second cause of the late excessive increase of crime, according to the Enquiry, was an epidemic of gin drinking, "a new Kind of Drunkenness unknown to our Ancestors [which] is lately sprung up amongst us." Gin, says Fielding, appeared to be the principal sustenance of more than an hundred thousand Londoners, "the dreadful Effects of which I have the Misfortune every Day to see, and to smell too." The crime resulting from such drunkenness was obvious; but Fielding, looking far beyond the narrow confines of his court-room, beheld a future gin-sodden race, and he appeals to the legislature to put a stop to a practice, the consequences of which must alarm "the most sluggish Degree of Public Spirit." It is surely something more than a coincidence that a few weeks after these warnings were published, Hogarth issued his awful plate of Gin Lane. A third source of crime, in Fielding's eyes, was the gambling among the 'lower Classes of Life,'--a school "in which most Highwaymen of great eminence have been bred," and a habit plainly tending to the "Ruin of Tradesmen, the Destruction of Youth, and to the Multiplication of every Kind of Fraud and Violence." In this case the 'Eminent Magistrate' finds new legislation less needed than a vigorous enforcement of existing laws; such, he adds, "as hath lately been executed with great Vigour within the Liberty of Westminster." Before long the pages of Amelia were to bring home yet more forcibly to Fielding's readers the cruel results of the pleasures (or speculations) of the needy gambler,--the 'Destruction of Familys,' thereby incurred, no less than the breeding of highwaymen. Who does not remember "that famous scene when Amelia is spreading, for the recreant who is losing his money at the Kings Arms, the historic little supper of hashed mutton, which she has cooked with her own hands, and denying herself a glass of white wine to save the paltry sum of sixpence, 'while her Husband was paying a Debt of several Guineas incurred by the Ace of Trumps being in the hands of his Adversary'--a scene which it is impossible to read aloud without a certain huskiness in the [throat]." [6] The last great cause of crime which the Enquiry considers, and with much learning and detail, is the condition of the poor. Here Fielding's views on our modern problem of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid denunciation of the 'House of Correction' or Bridewell of the period, a prison for idle and disorderly persons where "they are neither to be corrected nor employed: and where with the conversation of many as bad and sometimes worse than themselves they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and confirmed in the Practice of Iniquity." The most impudent of the wretches brought before him, Fielding tells us, were always "such as have been before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell." These prisons, from which the disorderly and idle came out, "much more idle and disorderly than they went in," were, says Fielding, no other than "Schools of Vice, Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of Nastiness and Disease." A fixed (and lower) rate of wages, it is curious to note, is one remedy advocated in the Enquiry, for raising the condition of the poor.
Such were the 'temptations' to robbery that Fielding would have removed, nobly conceiving the highest office of the legislature to be that of prevention rather than cure. The Enquiry concludes with offering some more immediate palliatives for the diseased state of the body politic, in the removing of actual 'Encouragement to Robbery.' First among such encouragements Fielding places the fact that "the Thief disposes of his goods with almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman"; and he urged the need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen goods "and no questions asked." Such advertisements he declares to be "in themselves so very scandalous and of such pernicious Consequence, that if Men are not ashamed to own they prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to the Good of [the] Society it is a pity some effectual Law was not contrived to prevent their giving this public Countenance to Robbery for the future." And, under this head, he advocates legislation either for the regulating of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a "Set of Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor and grow fat sucking their Blood." The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the 'wolves in society,' may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted by Fielding's enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth century, the conduct and frequency of public executions. It has taken our legislators a hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private executions urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal 'Tyburn holiday' enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob. Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of escape afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the common-lodging houses of the day. Of the latter, crowded with miserable beds from the cellar to the garret, let out, at twopence a night the single beds, and threepence the double ones, Fielding draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend Hogarth's plates. And he concludes "Nay I can add what I myself once saw in the Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near seventy Men and Women," and where the money found on all the occupants (with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief) "did not amount to one shilling." In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency and Modesty," with the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be well"), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery, "the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a thousand more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one of their Capacity and Courage." And, leaving for a moment legislative reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession. With such sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no Country I believe in the World where that vulgar Maxim so generally prevails that what is the Business of every Man is the business of no Man; and for this plain Reason, that there is no Country in which less Honour is gained by serving the Public. He therefore who commits no crime against the Public, is very well satisfied with his own Virtue; far from thinking himself obliged to undergo any Labour, expend any Money, or encounter any Danger on such Account." And in no part of the Enquiry does the writer more truly show his wisdom than in the pages on 'false Compassion' that plausible weakness which refuses to prosecute the oppressors of the helpless and innocent, and which at that time, in the person of his Majesty, King George II. was, it appears, very active in pardoning offenders when convicted. Fielding's arguments are incontestable; but his apologue may have found even more favour in the age of wit. He hopes such good nature may not carry those in power so far, "as it once did a Clergyman in Scotland who in the fervour of his Benevolence prayed to God that He would be graciously pleased to pardon the poor Devil."
To the devil, whether in man or in society, Fielding was ever a 'spirited enemy'; and his first biographer tells us that "to the unworthy he was rather harsh." But the last page of this little book breathes that spirit of tenderness for hard pressed humanity which in Fielding was so characteristically mingled with a wholesome severity. If the legislature would take proper care to raise the condition of the poor, then he declares the root of the evil would be struck: "nor in plain Truth will the utmost severity to Offenders be justifiable unless we take every possible Method of preventing the offence ... the Subject as well as the child should be left without Excuse before he is punished: for in that Case alone the Rod becomes the Hand either of the Parent or the Magistrate." And his last word is one of compassion for the "many Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures [who] once in six weeks are carried to Slaughter"; of whom much the greater part might, with 'proper care and Regulations' have been made "not only happy in themselves but very useful Members of the Society which they now so greatly dishonour in the Sight of all Christendom."
Henry Fielding is himself his own best illustration when he declares that the "good Poet and the good Politician do not differ so much as some who know nothing of either art affirm; nor would Homer or Milton have made the worst Legislators of their Times."
To the reader of to-day the Enquiry betrays no party flavour, but its sedate pages clearly stirred up the hot feeling of the times. Early in February the Advertiser announced "This Day is published A Letter to Henry Fielding Esqre. occasioned by his Enquiry into the causes of the late increase of Robbers &c." And about the end of the month there appeared Considerations, in two numbers of the True Briton, "on Justice Fielding's 'Enquiry,' shewing his Mistakes about the Constitution and our Laws and that what he seems to propose is dangerous to our Properties, Liberties and Constitution." On March 7 was announced Observations on Mr Fielding's Enquiry, by one B. Sedgley. Some opposition squib, too, must have been launched, to judge by the following item from an advertisement column of the same date: "a Vindication of the Rights and Privileges of the Commonality of England, in Opposition to what has been advanced by the Author of the Enquiry, or to what may be promulgated by any Ministerial Artifices against the public Cause of Truth and Liberty. By Timothy Beckthe Happy Cobler of Portugal-[street]." [7] Perhaps some collector of eighteenth century pamphlets may be able to reveal these comments of the 'Happy Gobler of Portugal-street' upon the 'artifices' of Henry [Fielding]. [8]
In the February following the publication of the Enquiry a Parlimentary Committee was appointed "to revise and consider the Laws in being, which relate to Felonies and other Offences against the [Peace]." [9] The Committee included Lyttelton and Pitt, and there is of course every probability that Fielding's evidence would be taken; but it seems impossible now to discover what share he may have had in this move by the Government towards fresh criminal legislation. There is, however, the evidence of his own hand that in the matter of prison administration his efforts were not limited to academic pamphlets, or to the indictment, so soon to be published, contained in the terrible prison scenes of Amelia. The following letter to the Duke of [Newcastle] [10] shows an anxious endeavour to secure such good government as was possible for at least one of the gaols.
"My Lord
"It being of the utmost consequence to the Public to have a proper Prison Keeper of the new Prison at the Time, I beg leave to recommend Mr William Pentlow a Constable of St George Bloomsbury to your Grace's Protection in the present Vacancy. He is a Man of whose Courage and Integrity I have seen the highest Proofs, and is indeed every way qualified for the charge. I am with the most Perfect Respect,
"My Lord,
"Your Grace's most obedient
"and most humble servant,