Nobiltà sentimentale e mobilità sociale in 'The Adventures of David Simple' di Sarah Fielding

This essay examines Sarah Fielding’s 'The Adventures of David Simple' (1744) and its sequel, 'Volume the Last' (1753), within eighteenth-century debates on social mobility, virtue, and self-interest. Beginning with the so-called 'Pamela controversy' that included both the sequels of Richardson's novel and anti-Pamelist satires, the essay discusses ambivalent attitudes toward middle-class aspirations to gentility. It argues that Sarah Fielding tried to redefine nobility not as inherited rank or economic advancement, but as an ethical disposition grounded in active, disinterested sympathy. David Simple, the hero of her first novel, pursues true friendship, exposing the corruption of commercial, aristocratic, and impoverished worlds alike, all governed by private interest. The sentimental “family of love” he forms at the end of the novel offers an alternative to eighteenth-century English society based on affection, mutual aid, and shared labour. Yet the novel's sequel, 'Volume the Last', dismantles this sentimental utopia through betrayal, legal exploitation, downward mobility, and death. S. Fielding thus presents sentimental nobility as morally valuable but socially fragile, while entrusting one of the few survivors of the sequel's demise, a female character, Cynthia, with preserving its critical and regenerative potential within modern commercial society.