He was the first English novelist to beat the genre's ample fields, as Alexander Pope might have put it, and to explore its cheerier heights, where he discovered veins of truest ore. Before him, Daniel Defoe in
Robinson Crusoe (1719) had in his irrepressibly pragmatic way settled other coasts and marked out clear boundaries; in so doing, he was also preparing the way for another of Fielding's precursors, Samuel Richardson, who in
Pamela (1740-1741) began his disturbing, claustrophobic descent into subterranean regions, carrying his torch—as the French critic Denis Diderot would later say of Richardson's masterpiece
Clarissa (1747-1748)—into the depths of the cavern. From the beginning there have been critics— Samuel Johnson, for instance—who preferred the more introspective and circumstantial fiction of Richardson to Fielding's expansive comedies of manners; Richardson, declared Johnson, "knew how a watch was made," whereas Fielding could merely "tell the hour by looking on the dialplate." But there have been others, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who have redressed the balance in Fielding's favor: for Coleridge, coming to Fielding from a reading of Richardson was like throwing open the windows of a sickroom, letting in the sunshine and fresh air and revealing the panorama of England's pleasant countryside.
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