An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings

Henry Fielding
Edited by Malvin R. Zirker

A scholarly edition of works by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings

Henry Fielding
Edited by Malvin R. Zirker

A Clarendon Press Publication

Description

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.