Product Description
Jonathan Wild is truly 'great': spurning the callow and spiritless ways of 'lower' men, he treads his own path to fame and glory - by way of theft, fraud and betrayal. Against a backdrop of such colourful 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 told with a humour that belies the subtlety of the novel's ironic themes, and the vigour and sparkle characteristic of Fielding's best works.
From the Author
Henry Fielding, born in Somerset in 1707 and educated at Eton College, was a true son of London. The city became the landscape of his imagination and the centre of his multifarious activities. It is also the vibrant setting for the life and adventures of Jonathan Wild. Fielding was a dramatist long before he ever became a novelist. For eight years he wrote comedies, farces and burlesques, some of them considered to be notably lewd or ‘loose’, and was granted the title of ‘the English Molière’. In less than three years, between 1730 and 1732, he wrote no less than thirteen plays. Even by the copious standards of the day it was an astonishing production. In true urban fashion he also earned his living as a journalist and a pamphleteer. He wrote pamphlets entitled An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat, a satire on the use of Hanoverian mercenaries, and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope and the Pretender condemning the Stuart cause. He also edited newspapers and created a journalistic character, Hercules Vinegar, who commented on the topics of the day. His theatrical and journalistic gifts then came together in Jonathan Wild – or to give it is full title on its first appearance in 1743, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great.
