A noticeable trend among some eighteenth-century novelists was to claim one's work as the offspring of a well-received work of fiction. In the anonymously published Charlotte Summers (1750), the narrator-author presents himself as the illegitimate offspring of Henry Fielding’s narrator-author: ‘You must know then, I am the first Begotten, of the poetical Issue, of the much celebrated Biographer of Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones’. He continues in a playful, Fieldingesque tone – ‘I dare not pretend to be legitimately begotten’ – feeding off a relationship with the noted author while openly drawing attention to...