SOURCE: "'Words and Ideas': Fielding and the Augustan Critique of Language," in his Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 28-53.

In the following excerpt from his book Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony, Hatfield examines Fielding's moral vision in the context of early eighteenth-century concerns about the increasing discontinuity between words and the things they were intended to represent. Taking into account Fielding's occasional prose as well as his major novels, Hatfield focuses on Fielding's pessimism with respect to the potential for clear and coherent communication.

The idea of the "corruption of language" is as old, perhaps, as the study of language itself. It takes cognizance of an obvious fact—the phenomenon of linguistic change—and it was in this sense that the phrase was most often used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Fielding, however, it meant this and...