ABSTRACT
In a famous passage of The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes a speculative history of 'resentment'. The persistence of Henry Fielding within Charles Dickens's and his contemporaries' vision, even as they registered so many of his attitudes as morally reprehensible and dated, supports Nietzsche's claim that there is a relationship between the strength of the tribe and the felt burden of obligation to the ancestor. Bowdlerization is one mode of neutralizing the possible 'harm' of a debt to Fielding on the terrain of sex – and at its most startling in Is She His Wife?, Dickens's enfeebled imitation of The Modern Husband and its genre. Victorian writers were not as fully professionalized as Dickens wished to see them, but in the aggregate they were a more independent and organized social body than their eighteenth-century predecessors. One effect of that organization was a heightened level of awareness about their debt to the previous century's writers.
