A Proposal For Making An Effectual Provision For The Poor

A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor

An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings provides critical unmodernized texts of Henry Fielding's legal and social pamphlets during the period 1749 to 1753, when Fielding served as magistrate for the City and Liberty of Westminster and County of Middlesex. The texts, for the first time, are fully annotated, and a lengthy introduction places them in their biographical and intellectual context, and provides a detailed account of their publication and reception. Five of the six pamphlets included in this volume clearly serve the interests of the Pelham Administration. There is, however, no evidence to show that Fielding wrote any of the pamphlets at the invitation or command of figures of power within the Pelham Administration; instead he appears simply to have seized those opportunities appropriate to his office to further government interests or, as with An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), offered his own solutions to problems which Parliament was currently debating.

Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (1933) examines Fielding’s prodigious activity as dramatist, journalist, novelist and magistrate. Though Fielding lived mainly by his pen, the profession he had chosen for himself, and the one in which he ardently desired to succeed, was that of the law, and this book takes the man as a whole in looking at his writings and his success at law.