The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics) Read online

  THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING

  HENRY FIELDING was born at Sharpham Park, Somerset in 1707, the son of an army officer of aristocratic descent and profligate ways. In 1725 he was bound over to keep the peace after attempting to abduct an heiress. He was educated privately at first, then at Eton, and from 1728 to 1729 at Leyden University. He went to London in 1728 and published his first literary works, a satirical poem, The Masquerade, and a comedy, Love in Several Masques. From 1729 he managed a theatre and wrote a prodigious series of comedies and experimental and politically outspoken plays, such as Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737), which lampooned Sir Robert Walpole and his government. It was partly because of this last play that Walpole introduced the Licensing Act in 1737, which effectively ended Fielding’s career as a dramatist. After this Fielding embarked on a career in the law and was called to the Bar in 1740. He was commissioned as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster in 1748. With his half-brother, John, he established the Bow Street Runners and did much through his writings and actions to address crime in London. He never made enough money in the law for his needs and also engaged in schemes such as the Universal Register Office (an information and employment agency), as well as literary ventures, to try to improve his income. In 1734 he married Charlotte Cradock, a model for Sophia Western in Tom Jones (1749) and for the heroine of his last novel, Amelia (1751). He was distraught when she died in 1744, but in 1747 married her maid, Mary Daniel.

  Fielding began his career as a novelist in 1741 with Shamela, written as a negative response to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the tale of a virtuous servant who marries her master. The following year, he published Joseph Andrews, a more positive demonstration of his skills and beliefs; by taking his characters on the road, he departs from the concerns and narrow plot of Pamela, and anticipates his masterpiece, Tom Jones. Amelia was much darker in tone, and less popular with critics and readers. He also produced political and satirical journals which unite the concerns of his literary and public life: The Champion (1739–40), The True Patriot (1745–6), The Jacobite’s Journal (1747–8) and The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). He published his Miscellanies in 1743; his final work, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, a poignant description of his last days, was published posthumously in 1755. He died in physical pain and mental distress near Lisbon in 1754.

  THOMAS KEYMER is Elmore Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His books include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002) and, co-edited with Jon Mee, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830 (2004). ALICE WAKELY completed a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Richardson at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2000, and currently holds a post in the Registrar’s Department at the University of York. The editors have previously collaborated on the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Richardson’s Pamela (2001).

  HENRY FIELDING

  The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  Edited with Explanatory Notes by

  THOMAS KEYMER and ALICE WAKELY

  With an Introduction by THOMAS KEYMER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published 1749

  Published in Penguin Classics 2005

  1

  Introduction copyright © Thomas Keymer, 2005

  Other editorial material copyright © Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, 2005

  Chronology copyright © Judith Hawley, 1999

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–90768–0

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Text

  THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING

  Appendix: The Man of the Hill

  Map

  Notes

  Glossary of Latin Tags

  Acknowledgements

  Our foremost debt is to the pioneering work of R. P. C. Mutter, editor of the first Penguin edition of Tom Jones (1966), and of Martin C. Battestin and his fellow editors of the standard Wesleyan edition of Fielding’s novels, journalism and miscellaneous writings. There are also good modern editions of Tom Jones by Sheridan Baker (1973, 1995) and John Bender and Simon Stern (1996). Lance Bertelsen, Linda Bree, John Dussinger, Paul Monod, Claude Rawson and Peter Sabor have all kindly helped us on points of detail, and we thank our editors at Penguin for their patience and support. Thomas Keymer is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding a period of leave that facilitated, alongside the major project, completion of this edition.

  Chronology

  1707 22 April: Henry Fielding born to Edmund Feilding or Fielding (1680–1741), a raffish and prodigal army officer, and his wife, Sarah (1682–1718), at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, home of his maternal grandfather, Sir Henry Gould. Distrusting the improvident Edmund, Sir Henry leaves an estate in trust to provide for Sarah and her children.

  1709–19 Early years spent on a farm at East Stour, Dorset, provided by Sir Henry’s bequest.

  1718 14 April: death of Fielding’s mother.

  1719 Possibly in January, Edmund marries Anne Rapha, a widow and Roman Catholic with children of her own. HF is sent to Eton, and his surviving siblings, Catherine (1708–50), Ursula (1709–50), Sarah (1710–68), Beatrice (1714–51) and Edmund (1716–?), are taken care of by Lady Gould in Salisbury. Meanwhile, Edmund cuts into the profits of his children’s estate.

  1719–24 Educated at Eton; a contemporary of William Pitt and Henry Fox, and a friend of George Lyttelton, who later becomes an important patron. Although he seems to have studied his lessons at school, HF is reported to have run wild during his youth, probably in reaction to the family problems which arose after his mother’s death.

  1721–2 Lady Gould sues Edmund in Chancery for custody of the children and of what is left of the farm in East Stour. In the protracted and bitter court case, Lady Gould’s supporters accuse the second Mrs Fielding of m
istreating the children and of trying to convert them to Rome; and claim that HF had incestuous relations with his sister Beatrice, then aged four and a half. The court gives judgment against Edmund so the children and the farm come under the control of Lady Gould.

  1725 24 May: witnesses execution in London of the notorious criminal Jonathan Wild.

  November: attempts unsuccessfully to carry away by force one Sarah Andrew, a wealthy heiress, whose guardian had refused to allow her to marry HF.

  1726 When Sarah Andrew marries someone else, HF vents his spleen by translating part of Juvenal’s misogynistic Sixth Satire. He also presses his father for money and assaults one of his father’s servants.

  1727 July: stepmother, Anne, dies. Submits a comic play, Love in Several Masques, to his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for her revision and patronage.

  10 November: his first published works, now lost: The Coronation: A Poem, and An Ode on the Birthday, to celebrate the accession of George II.

  1728 29 January: The Masquerade, a satiric poem, published under the pseudonym ‘Lemuel Gulliver’.

  16 February: Love in Several Masques, his first play, produced; published 23 February.

  1728–9 16 March 1728–30 April 1729: registered as a student of letters, University of Leyden; stays only three months at first, then, after having turned his hand to political journalism in England in summer 1728, returns to Leyden in February 1729. Little is known of his time here. HF drafts the play Don Quixote in England, and seems to have left in a hurry because sued by creditors.

  1729 January: father marries Eleanor Hill, a wealthy widow from Salisbury.

  Autumn: moves to London and, with some difficulty, establishes a theatrical career.

  1730–37 Has numerous plays – all of them comedies – performed at various London theatres, including The Author’s Farce (1730), Rape upon Rape (1730), Tom Thumb (1730), The Lottery (1732), The Modern Husband (1732), The Mock Doctor (1732), The Miser (1733), Don Quixote in England (1734), The Universal Gallant (1735), The Virgin Unmasked (1735), Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737). In February 1736, as ‘The Great Mogul’, he takes over management of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket where he stages most of his experimental plays. His personal life continues to be restless and often troubled. In the early 1730s he spends his summers in Salisbury and winters with his free-thinking and free-living friends in London, running up debts and getting into scrapes.

  1734 28 November: elopes with and marries Charlotte Cradock, after which he spends more time at East Stour and gradually reforms his friendships, behaviour and beliefs.

  1737 June: the Stage Licensing Act, partly prompted by The Historical Register for 1736, effectively ends HF’s theatrical career, though he tries to have plays performed in later years (e.g., 1742, 1743 and 1745).

  1 November: enters the Middle Temple and begins studying law.

  1737–8 Writes for the Opposition paper The Craftsman.

  1738 February: the farm at East Stour sold to raise money; the Fieldings are no longer landed gentry.

  1739 15 November: sets up The Champion, a periodical along the lines of The Spectator, and contributes leaders, literary criticism, and moral, topical and political essays, until early November 1740, after which his partner, James Ralph, takes over.

  1740 20 June: called to the Bar earlier than is customary; strings were presumably pulled for him.

  July–September: begins pattern of spending the summer on the Western Circuit, and, from 1741, September in Bath.

  10 October: still short of funds, HF publishes his translation of Gustave Adlerfeld, Histoire militaire de Charles XII, Roi de Suède (first published 1739).

  November: his father is committed to the Fleet Prison for debt. 6 November: Samuel Richardson publishes Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.

  1741 7 January: Of True Greatness, a poem, published in pamphlet form.

  15 January–6 March: The History of our own Times, intended as a fortnightly magazine, runs for a few issues.

  22 January: The Vernoniad, a mock-epic poem.

  9 March: while still confined for debt, Edmund marries Elizabeth Sparrye, probably his servant.

  March: HF held for a fortnight in a sponging house, a halfway station to debtors’ prison, for a debt he did not finally clear until 26 May 1742.

  4 April: Shamela.

  18 June: Edmund Fielding dies without leaving anything to his children.

  25 June: selections from The Champion reprinted in 2 vols. December: The Opposition: A Vision, a pro-Walpole poem.

  1742 22 February: Joseph Andrews.

  6 May: Miss Lucy in Town, an unsuccessful attempt to resume writing for the stage.

  31 May: Aristophanes’s Plutus, the God of Riches, translated with Revd William Young, on whom Abraham Adams is modelled.

  1743 12 April: Miscellanies, in 3 vols., including Jonathan Wild and A Journey from This World to the Next, published by subscription.

  1744 4 May: Sarah Fielding, David Simple, with a preface by HF.

  November: death of HF’s beloved wife, Charlotte, in Bath.

  14 November: she is buried in London, but HF does not attend her funeral.

  23 November: An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat, a pro-Opposition satire.

  1745 2 July: The Charge to the Jury, satirical pamphlet about the death of Walpole.

  3 October: A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, warning about the consequences of the current Jacobite rebellion.

  7 October: The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland.

  5 November–17 June 1746: edits The True Patriot, an anti-Jacobite journal.

  1746 12 November: The Female Husband, a pamphlet loosely based on the true case of the lesbian transvestite, Mary Hamilton.

  1747 25 February: Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased, and Adapted to the Present Time.

  10 April: Sarah Fielding, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, with a Preface and contribution by HF.

  27 November: marries his cook-maid, Mary Daniel (d. 1802); their first child, William, born within three months and baptized 25 February 1748.

  5 December–5 November 1748: edits The Jacobite’s Journal, a pro-Government paper.

  1748 28 March–2 June: with his wife serving refreshments under the name of ‘Madame de la Nash’, runs ‘a Puppet Show after the Antient Manner’ from his house in Panton Street, London.

  30 July: entered in the Commission of the Peace for Westminster; his appointment as magistrate is confirmed by oath on 25 October.

  9 December: takes up residence in Bow Street, London.

  1749 12 January: is finally able to act as magistrate for the county of Middlesex, his name having been entered in the Commission of the Peace 20 June 1747 before he was fully eligible. HF pursues his office with great diligence; in January 1750 he institutes raids to break up gangs of street-robbers – the origin of the ‘Bow Street Runners’; he drafts bills and publishes pamphlets on ways to combat crime; his strenuous campaign against violent crime in the autumn and winter of 1753 hastens his death.

  3–10 February: Tom Jones; four editions published by December of this year.

  18 November: A True State of the Case of Bosalvern Penlez, a pamphlet defending the unpopular decision to execute a rioter.

  1750 19 February: with his blind half-brother and fellow lawyer John, HF opens the Universal Register Office, an advertising and employment agency.

  1751 19 January: An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers.

  19 December: Amelia.

  1752 4 January–25 November: edits The Covent-Garden Journal, an entertaining and moral journal which publicizes HF’s activities in combating crime.

  13 April: Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder.