An Essay to Prove That an Author Will Write the Better for Having Some Knowledge of the Subject on Which He Writes
- In this day and age, some writers have been able to get famous without a solid education in literature behind them.
- The narrator thinks this is terrible.
- After all, why should writing be different from any other craft, which you have to study hard to perfect?
- The narrator speculates that one reason why no English writers have written really well about upper-class life in particular is that none of them know anything about it.
- After all, you can't find the true upper class in coffeehouses or on the street.
- So where are you supposed to observe them?
- You can only see the upper classes if you have lots of money and high birth.
- And people with these two things rarely take to writing.
- But honestly, true knowledge of the upper class is not actually helpful to a comedy writer like Fielding.
- Life at the top is mostly made up of people sticking strictly to good form.
- Their days are mostly made up of "dressing and cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtseying" (14.1.11).
- It's among the lower classes that you see real variety.
- Well, there are people even among the upper classes who give in to passion.
- Lady Bellaston is such a woman.
- But Lady Bellaston is an exception to current trends: the idea that people in modern high society are super lustfulis wrong.
- It's not that people are having more love affairs than in the past.
- Rather, nowadays, people are totally focused on stuff like the social and financial positions of their partners.
- Things like love and passion are actually pretty unfashionable.