ABSTRACT
The main mock-heroic scheme of Jonathan Wild was Henry Fielding's first great fictional conception. The main structural formula of Jonathan Wild is mock-historical rather than mock-epic, its style is in fact shot through with reminders of ancient epic. The mock-history resembles the familiar mock-epic procedures of Pope and other Augustan poets, where the parody of heroic poems attacks not the heroic poems themselves, but something else. Radical criticism of the heroic is likewise firmly kept out of the great Augustan mock-heroics. The action of Jonathan Wild is mock-heroic in relation to both epic and history, in that it is a small-time version of both. But its relation to history is one of direct parallel, whereas its relation to epic tends to be inverted. The whole of Jonathan Wild is a special ironic illustration of the principle that there are 'a thousand equal to Alexander': one needs only, like Wild, to be sufficiently criminal.
