Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction

Abstract

The female husband (published 12 November 1746) is an anonymous pamphlet so obscure and so nearly pornographic that its few acquaintances have passed it by, almost in complete silence. I know of only four copies, one each in the British Museum, the Bristol Public Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the library of Charles B. Woods, of the State University of Iowa. It purports to be the biography of one Mary Hamilton, who was in fact tried for fraud at Taunton, Somerset, on 7 October 1746. It has long been acknowledged, on external evidence, as Henry Fielding's. But among themselves scholars remain skeptical. The pamphlet has remained in limbo, listed for immortality but ignored, not quite accepted and not quite damned. I hope to demonstrate beyond all doubt that The Female Husband is Fielding's, and to suggest that this pamphlet, though of slight literary worth, is an interesting exhibit of Fielding at work upon meager journalistic fact, a somewhat discomforting glimpse of the comic moralist trying to sustain his principles and his comedy within recalcitrant material.