Jonathan Wild the Great (Hesperus Classics) [Paperback]

Henry Fielding (Author), Peter Ackroyd (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2004 | Series: Hesperus Classics

A hilarious black comedy of manners and morals, based on the crimes and career of a real-life 18th-century gangland criminal, Jonathan Wild the Great is one of the finest satires in the English language. Jonathan Wild is truly “great”—spurning the callow and spiritless ways of “lower” men, he walks his own path to fame and glory, by way of theft, fraud, and betrayal. Against a backdrop of such colorful characters as the whore Miss Molly Straddle, the cardsharp Count La Ruse, and the base and weak Mr. Thomas Heartfree, Wild’s passage from cradle to gallows is recounted with a humor that belies the subtlety of the novel’s ironic themes. Novelist and dramatist Henry Fielding is best known for his light-hearted novels and satires. His masterpiece, Tom Jones, is acknowledged as one of the finest novels in the English language.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Hesperus Press (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843910896
• ISBN-13: 978-1843910893
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars What a wolf is in a sheepfold, a great man is in society, December 13, 2005

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jonathan Wild the Great (Hesperus Classics) (Paperback)

For Henry Fielding, 'great men', like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and 'great rogues', like Jonathan Wild, are synonymous terms. Greatness consists in bringing all manners of mischief on mankind.

Alexander the Great overran a whole empire with fire and sword, pillaging, sacking, burning, enslaving and destroying millions of his fellow creatures. Julius Caesar abolished the republican liberties of his country in order to take the power into his own hands.

At the opposite side of the spectrum, Jonathan Wild was a great prig (pick-pocket), cheating the very tools who were his instruments to cheat others: 'I had rather stand at the summit of a dunghill, than at the bottom of a hill in paradise.'

For Henry Fielding, greatness rimes with ambition, lust, avarice, rapaciousness, hypocrisy, power, pride, insolence, insatiability, 'a privilege to kill, a strong temptation to do bravely ill'. Greatness is 'playing with the passions of men, to work one's own purposes out of the jealousies and apprehensions to create those great arts which the vulgar call treachery, dissembling, promising, lying, falshood, summed up in the collective name of POLLITRICKS.'

And all that for what? Not for the general good of society, but for the power and the glory of the great man himself, for the satisfaction of his vices.

The fact that 'he is hated and detested by all mankind makes him inwardly satisfied. Otherwise, why should he stand at the head of a multitude of prigs, called an army, in order to molest his neighbours, to introduce rape, rapine, bloodshed and every kind of misery on his own species, to desire maliciously to rob those subjects, to reduce them to an absolute dependence on his own will, to betray the interest of his fellow-subjects, of his brethren.'

Jonathan Wild: 'I ought rather weep with Alexander, that I have ruined not more.'

Another target of the author are the hypocritical priests: 'Life is sweet, I had rather live to eternity ... so many wallow in wealth and preferment.'

He insults the ordinary, who attends to the spiritual needs of condemned criminals; 'You are more unmerciful to me than the Judge.'

Henry Fielding's forceful diatribe against all conquerers, tyrants, pollitrickers, and vicious 'prigs' still sounds extremely modern.

He blames the majority of mankind to continue to praise the said great men.

But, 'there are still some, who view these great men with a malignant eye and dare affirm that these great men are always the most pernicious and generally the most wretched and truly contemptible of all works of creation.'

This book is a ferocious and, unfortunately, still very topical satire.

A must read.