Existing accounts of Fielding's political ideas are insufficiently aware of the structure of politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and of the ways in which Whig political ideology developed following the Revolution of 1688. This political biography explains and illustrates what 'being a Whig' meant to Fielding.
Reviews
'a scrupulously researched account of Fielding's political writings through the filter of recent scholarly debate about them, demonstrating very clearly where he differs from those who came before, and providing both a staging-post and a start-point for further twenty-first-century scholarly discussion of Fielding's political views.' Eighteenth-Century Life 'In its detailed explications of the interactions between [differing] faces of Fielding's politics, Mr Downie's account is extremely helpful and clarifying, perhaps the most through reading of the evidence to date-and especially notable for reading the silences too. It will likely remain the definitive account.' The Scriblerian
