[Gutenberg 1146] • The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

When Fielding was winched aboard the *Queen of Portugal* bound for Lisbon in June 1754 he had small hope of surviving even the milder Portuguese winter. The author of *Joseph Andrews* and *Tom Jones* was 'dying from a complication of disorders' and the gravity of his illness sparks the unflinching humour and pathos of the *Journal*. In it Fielding scrutinizes his body's decay and the corruption of English society, undercutting with irony his own high claims for his former conduct as a London magistrate. In it, too, he makes merry with xenophobia and the rapturous excesses of contemporary travel writing, while casting himself in the role of a post-heroic Odysseus or Aeneas, a role tinged with farce as he charts the tortuous voyage of the *Queen of Portugal*. Tom Keymer provides an illuminating introduction to this volume, which at last makes popularly available a scholarly edition of the *Journal*. Completed some weeks before Fielding's death on 8 October 1754, the work is at once comic, valedictory and intensely poignant, and it is indeed 'his art's great sunset'.