cover image The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last

The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last

Sarah Fielding. University Press of Kentucky, $45 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-8131-2055-3

A bestseller when it first appeared in 1744, The Adventures of David Simple has since suffered at the hands of Sarah's more famous brother, Henry, who edited the novel substantially in all subsequent editions. Now Sabor has done a service to academics and general readers by restoring Sarah Fielding's original text. In the opening chapters of this ""Moral Romance,"" David Simple's brother cheats him out of his inheritance; David's fortune is restored only when a guilt-stricken accomplice reveals the crime. After this betrayal, David makes a quixotic resolution ""To travel though the whole World rather than not meet with a real Friend."" He finds nothing but deceit until he meets with Cynthia, Valentine and Camilla, genteel but impoverished young people whose relations have unfairly cast them off. The novel concludes with a double marriage; the couples will live together in a utopian establishment funded by David's inheritance. Fielding's 1753 sequel, Volume the Last, is considerably darker. David endures a Job-like series of afflictions as, plagued by lawsuits, false friends and illness, he loses his fortune, his house, his children and his beloved wife. On his deathbed, David meditates on ""the Horrors of Friendship"": attachment to loved ones leads only to pain in a world where ""solid and lasting Happiness is not to be attained."" Sabor's introduction lays out the family tragedies and financial difficulties that perplexed Fielding's career and provides a detailed revisionist account of her impressive literary accomplishments. (May)