The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics) Read online

1753 29 January: Proposal for making an effective Provision for the Poor.

  20 March: A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, a pamphlet in defence of a supposed victim of abduction (who later turns out to be an impostor).

  1754 January: John Fielding takes his brother’s place as Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex, but HF continues performing his duties until his health gives way completely.

  19 March: revised edition of Jonathan Wild.

  26 June–7 August: travels to Lisbon in the vain hope of restoring his health.

  8 October: HF dies at Junqueira, near Lisbon, and is buried in the Protestant burial ground in Lisbon.

  1755 25 February: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, HF’s lively and irascible account of his last voyage, published simultaneously in two versions.

  Introduction

  Novels get a bad press in Fielding’s great novel. One minor character, an adventurer in search of an impressionable heiress, reads erotic fiction by Aphra Behn with a conviction (as Fielding archly puts it) ‘that he would find no more effectual Method of recommending himself to the Ladies than the improving his Understanding, and filling his Mind with good Literature’ (X. ii). Another character, the voluptuous widow of a wealthy old merchant, divides the customary period of mourning ‘between her Devotions and Novels’, and propositions Tom when it ends (XV. xi). In this world, novels are tools of seduction or substitutes for sex, written and read for enrichment or pleasure of only the lowest kinds. Fielding catches here a reputation that the new prose fiction had struggled to shed since Behn’s heyday of the 1680s. When he declares elsewhere that ‘to the Composition of Novels… nothing is necessary but Paper, Pens and Ink, with the manual Capacity of using them’ (IX. i), he registers a generic status that was still substantially in place when Tom Jones appeared in 1749. Novels were the perishable stuff, in this persistent view, of a dumbed-down literary marketplace. If not actually pernicious, they were trifling commodities at best, fed to frivolous readers by talentless hacks whose muse was not Calliope or Clio but rather – and in commercial Dutch, not classical Greek – ‘the fat Ufrow Gelt’, or Mistress Money (XIII. i).

  Satirical sideswipes like these align Tom Jones with a Scriblerian cultural agenda – with satires such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) and Pope’s Dunciad (1728/1743), in which disdain for lowbrow print did not exclude an imaginative relish for its fugitive energies. This was a pose that Fielding had struck since launching his youthful career as a playwright by associating himself, under the pseudonym ‘Scriblerus Secundus’, with the Pope–Swift circle or ‘Scriblerus Club’. The claim to affinity was presumptuous but also pervasive, not least in his early play The Author’s Farce (1730), which develops the Dunciad’s notorious caricature of Eliza Haywood, the leading writer of fiction between Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, into the ludicrous figure of ‘Mrs. Novel’. Yet none of this mockery could prevent disparagers from reading Tom Jones, on first publication, in just the terms from which Fielding had sought to detach it. In the Romantic period Coleridge would praise the work for its ‘wholesome’ morality and for having ‘one of the three most perfect plots ever planned’.1 More typical of Tom Jones’s immediate reception, however, was the criticism of ‘Orbilius’, whose rancorous An Examen of the History of Tom Jones (1749) derided Fielding on moral grounds, and found in his digressive episodes and inserted tales nothing more than a ruse to swell the text and raise the price – ‘to fill up, not to further, our Author’s wonderful Plot’.2

  For its noisiest early censurers, Tom Jones was a scabrous, scurrilous, catchpenny farrago, objectionable both ethically and aesthetically, and all the more reprehensible for the briskness of its sale. The Tory newspaper Old England had ulterior political motives when denouncing ‘this motely History of Bastardism, Fornication and Adultery’, but the studiously neutral Gentleman’s Magazine was barely more positive, deploring a crowd-pleasing strain of bawdry in Fielding’s work that left learned editions of Shakespeare unread while ‘the world is run a madding after… that rake Tom Jones’.3 Samuel Richardson, who was on good enough terms with Fielding the previous year to show him part of his masterpiece Clarissa (1747–8) in advance of publication, affected not to have read ‘the truly coarse-titled Tom Jones’, and instead relayed the damning opinion of unidentified friends. For these friends – who sound uncannily like Richardson himself – Tom Jones was ‘a rambling Collection of Waking Dreams’, and a work deformed and depraved by mercenary ends. Fielding’s first priority had been ‘to fill his Pocket, by accommodating it to the reigning Taste’; his second ‘to whiten a vicious Character, and to make Morality bend to his Practices’.4

  Yet we can now look back on Tom Jones, with Clarissa, as foremost among a small group of mid-eighteenth-century novels that set the genre firmly on course towards its later prestige. In time, indeed, it helped to transform the very sense of the term ‘novel’, which in Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 was still deemed to signify ‘a small tale, generally of love’, and not yet the expansive, ambitious form that was now emerging.5 Amid all the detraction Tom Jones had its early admirers, from the leading bluestocking Elizabeth Carter, who ranked it above Clarissa, to the ministerial grandee George Lyttelton, whose conversational promotion of the work set up a chain reaction through London’s coffee-houses, it was said, that made the initial print-run sell out ahead of publication. With four authorized editions (running in total to 10,000 copies) published within a year, the immediate impact of Tom Jones is beyond question. Fielding secured from his publisher Andrew Millar a remarkable advance of £600 (a sum that would amply support a family with servants for a year), and according to a seasoned observer ‘might probably have got 5 times as much by it, had he kept the right in his own hands’.6 Dublin reprints quickly followed, with Dutch, French and German translations appearing in 1750, and the gains to be made by cashing in on Fielding’s created world are clear from enterprising appropriations such as The History of Tom Jones, the Foundling, in His Married State (1749) and The History of Charlotte Summers, The Fortunate Parish Girl (1750). This second novel is the tale of a female Tom Jones, written by an unknown opportunist who claimed – with startling deafness to the evidence of his own style – to be in literary terms ‘a right Slip of the F——gs, and as like him as if he had spit me out of his Mouth, as the Saying is’.7

  Critical prestige began to build up with publications such as An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding, a pamphlet of 1751 possibly written by Francis Coventry, which scornfully intensified Fielding’s distinction between his own work and prevailing modes of fiction ‘commonly known by the Name of Romances, or Novels, Tales, & c.’.8 This process was advanced after Fielding’s death by the habit of the reviewing periodicals that regulated taste in the century’s third quarter to disparage new novels by contrast with Tom Jones – a masterpiece to be censured for one fault only, as the Critical Review put it in 1756, that it had done for fiction ‘what Pope attributes to Lord Burlington in architecture, Fill’d half the world with imitating fools’.9 Later, the prominent place of Tom Jones in the multi-volume anthologies of novels that proliferated after the collapse of perpetual copyright in 1774 confirmed Fielding’s leadership (with Richardson) of a genre widely recognized by the early nineteenth century as of real canonical importance. Influential Richardsonians such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld would have disputed Walter Scott’s unqualified talk in 1820 of ‘Henry Fielding, father of the English Novel’,10 and the turn to inwardness in high Victorian fiction would later make Richardson’s look the more durable presence. In the ascendancy of Thackeray and Dickens a century after Tom Jones, however, Fielding seemed to have become the defining influence on the dominant literary genre. Today he remains the classic example (with the more extreme instance of Sterne) of the self-conscious novelist for whom narrative is not a transparent window on the world but rather, in its complex reflections and refractions, a medium of fascination in itself.

  The showy self-conscio
usness of Tom Jones was central to Fielding’s strategy for presenting himself as a generic pioneer, ‘the Founder of a new Province of Writing’ (II. i). Like Richardson in Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, he chose in the extended title The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling to eschew the dubious designation of ‘novel’ in favour of the prestige of history – though with typical contrariness he gave away with one hand what he seized with the other, appending a scandalous subtitle which then, in the running head ‘The HISTORY of a FOUNDLING’, brazenly permeated the whole text. Where Fielding differed from his great rival was in his attitude to earlier writing. Richardson’s first novel Pamela (1740), the catalyst for the mid-eighteenth-century flowering of the genre, created startlingly original effects through its first-person epistolary form, in particular a previously unachieved intimacy of access to consciousness or, as Richardson’s promoters put it, to ‘the inmost Recesses of her Mind’.11 That said, Pamela was also an ingenious blend and reworking of existing narrative traditions, from spiritual autobiography in the style of Bunyan to amatory fiction of the kind typified by ‘Mrs. Novel’ (some of whose output we now know Richardson, a leading London printer, to have handled in the previous decade).12 Richardson had drawn silently or even furtively on these sources, however, with little overt reference to prior models except the Bible and Aesop, and with every effort to conceal the author’s shaping role beneath what he privately called ‘the umbrage of the editor’s character’.13 Officially, Pamela was a collection of documents from real life, and at least some of its early readers accepted it as such.

  Responding to Pamela in his own first novel Joseph Andrews (1742), Fielding set up a pointed contrast to Richardson’s methods of narrative ventriloquism and authorial disavowal, cultivating an emphatically authorial (though mobile and protean) voice that called constant attention to the artifice of the text and the ingenuity of his managerial role. Here elegant plotting mattered more than interior life, and more important still was the discursive assessment of character and action overlaid by the narrating voice. Fielding made central to the definition of this authorial persona its learned wit – a playful and knowing deployment of sources far removed from the Behn–Haywood tradition of fiction or from Richardson’s conversion of it. As the title-page proclaimed, Joseph Andrews was ‘Written in Imitation of the Manner of CERVANTES, Author of Don Quixote’, and Fielding drew from this Renaissance example a sophisticated formal experimentalism that had taken as its original foil, in Cervantes’ hands, the absurdities of chivalric romance. Recognizing the persistence of this romance genre beyond Don Quixote, Fielding instead invoked an epic tradition from Homer’s Iliad to Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699), thereby identifying Joseph Andrews as ‘a comic Romance’ in the special and generically agile sense of being also ‘a comic Epic-Poem in Prose’.14 The shade of Polonius lurks in these words,15 but Fielding’s effort to distinguish himself from less sophisticated recent novelists is wholly in earnest. He resumes and adjusts the definition when calling Tom Jones ‘this Heroic, Historical, Prosaic Poem’ (IV. i), reinforcing the point now with sly contrasting allusions to particular novels. His feigned embarrassment at the ‘strange and surprizing’ incidents arising at one point in Tom Jones (VIII. i) quietly mocks the extended title of Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), with its promise of sensationalist plotting. His refusal ‘to pay a Visit to the inmost Recesses of [Blifil’s] Mind’ (IV. iii) teasingly renounces, with clear reference to Richardson’s terminology, the prurient intimacies of Pamela.

  Evidently enough, here was a kind of fiction to which a great deal more was necessary than the capacity to put pen to paper. Among Fielding’s trademarks as a writer are his gleeful lurches from high style into low, and much of Tom Jones’s vigour flows from its breaches of decorum: the deadpan double entendre surrounding its heroine’s muff, for example; the low-life demotic that Fielding reportedly researched ‘by conversing with… the Vauxhall water-men’; his casual garnering of material from a popular jest-book.16 The most insistent signals sent out by Tom Jones, however, are that its composition involves a prestigious range of classical sources, digested and displayed with erudite wit. Unlike several comic characters in the novel whose Latin is blunderingly misapplied, Fielding flaunts his sophistication in a commentary on the narrative and its intertextual dimension that ranges freely between serious and parodic tones. Modern theories of the origins and rise of the novel stress the hybrid character of a genre that hurls together a swarm of prior discourses and traditions. In this respect, there is less tension than might appear between Fielding’s claim to be founding a new province of writing (as opposed, say, to inheriting an ancient state) and the simultaneous rootedness of this writing in epic, Cervantic, and other longstanding traditions. The originality lies in the combination and reformulation, and in the playful chapters of metanarrative commentary that Fielding uses to explore the dynamics of the process. These chapters at once define the new province and defend it from annexation. Their inclusion is laid down by Fielding ‘as a Rule necessary to be observed in all prosai-comi-epic Writing’ (V. i), and will become, he goes on to declare, ‘a Kind of Mark or Stamp, which may hereafter enable a very indifferent Reader to distinguish what is true and genuine in this historic Kind of Writing, from what is false and counterfeit’ (IX. i).

  Fielding’s point here is not diminished by the mock pomposity of its expression, as George Eliot recognized a century later. Recalling these passages in Middlemarch (1871–2), Eliot adds an image that nicely catches the distinctive subordination of dramatic action in Tom Jones to the discursive mediation of its author. ‘A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself,’ she writes, ‘… glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English.’17

  Among the advantages of the introductory chapters was the opportunity they gave Fielding to address the distinctive situation of the novelist in the expanding print culture of the day. As Claude Rawson has observed, authorial commentary was a mechanism that Fielding had previously used in his stage comedies, especially his exercises in the Restoration genre of the ‘rehearsal’ play, which disrupt conventions of representation and jumble different mimetic levels in a way that anticipates the theatre of the absurd.18Tom Jones pushes the technique further, enabling Fielding to take regular meditative walks around his fiction, scrutinizing its implications and procedures. The opening chapter famously identifies an author in the modern book trade ‘not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary [i.e. tavern], at which all Persons are welcome for their Money’ (I. i). From these opening words, Fielding is alive to conditions that radically separate the modern novelist not only from the coterie poet of earlier ages, who circulates his work in manuscript among known friends and patrons, but also from his own previous incarnation as a dramatist and theatre manager, who sees and hears his audience and can monitor and measure their reactions. The profound anonymity entailed by print – ‘Reader, it is impossible we should know what Sort of Person thou wilt be’ (X. i) – is a preoccupation throughout Tom Jones, and the chattiness to which George Eliot alludes is in part a remedial campaign to simulate an intimacy of communication with his readers, a sociability around the text, that could otherwise no longer exist.

  Different chapters test out different models of the author’s relationship to his readers, though with common emphasis on the freedom of these unseen readers, as they respond, interpret and judge, from absolute authorial control. One chapter likens them to political subjects, but not subjects of a ‘jure divino Tyrant’ (II. i). Rather, Fielding’s author is a limited contractual monarch of the kind established by the constitutional settlement of 1689, who circumscribes but also guarantees the freedoms of his people, and who in g
ood Lockean style ‘was created for their Use, and not they for mine’. Political language returns three books later with reference to the ‘Dictatorial Power’ usurped by critics (V. i), and here – in the very year of the Monthly Review’s launch – Fielding is at his most prescient in registering a force that was to mediate powerfully between authors and readers in the decades ahead. Equally important in Tom Jones, however, is the alternative trope of conversation. The last of the introductory chapters reworks Joseph Andrews’s idea of novel-reading as a journey by stage-coach, but shifts the analogy to locate the fiction not in a world observed through the stage-coach window, but rather in a dialogue played out in the coach itself. The novel exists in language alone, or rather in a conversational interplay between Fielding’s narrating voice and his captive audience. Nor is this ‘Conversation’ between author and readers entirely harmonious and stable, as Fielding implies in his talk of the ‘Bickerings or little Animosities which may have occurred on the Road’, and in his insistence that at last ‘whatever Characters any of the Passengers have for the Jest-sake personated on the Road, are now thrown off’ (XVIII. i). Fielding’s narrator is a mercurial presence, not to be taken for a consistent and reliable spokesman of authorial opinion or trusted in everything he says; but readers too can be capricious and unruly in responding to this voice. We participate here in a narrative transaction that seeks to recover something of the fluidity of oral culture, even in the fixity of print. As Sterne was to amplify the hint in Tristram Shandy (1759–67), writing ‘is but a different name for conversation’, and a conversation that no single interlocutor should monopolize: ‘The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’19