It would be a crude procedure to extract opinion from the Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and use it to cut through the moral complexities of Tom Jones. We might indeed conclude that, just as in the case of Jacobitism and the True Patriot, the form of the comic novel – or even the protected realm of ‘comic Romance’ – enabled Fielding to think in more exploratory, innovative and open ways than he could do as a writer of tracts. The context of the Enquiry makes clear, however, that Tom’s amiable insistence on mercy was no more adequate in Fielding’s eyes than Allworthy’s case for severity, and that the benign authorial voice of Tom Jones, for all its mobility, did not exhaust the range of voices available to the historical Fielding. Emphatically, yet without resolution, Fielding used Tom Jones to confront his readers with problems that he himself, for all their importance and urgency, was unable to approach with singleness of mind. For the remainder of his life, as both author and justice, the dialogue went on. The gloomy authoritarianism into which magistracy propelled him left him unable to recapture in his last novel, Amelia, the cheerful exuberance of Tom Jones, and some of the prose of his dying years might almost have been written by the misanthropic Man of the Hill. Yet in practice Fielding also behaved on the bench as his impulsive hero might have done, always on the lookout for potential Andersons, and frequently exercising imaginative latitude in ways recorded in the legal columns of his last periodical venture, the Covent-Garden Journal (1752).
Exhausted by his judicial efforts, and gravely ill, Fielding left England for milder climes in 1754, and produced in his posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) an unflinching account of his condition that put Arthur Murphy, his first biographer, ‘in mind of a person, under sentence of death, jesting on the scaffold’.42 The journey was unavailing, and he died two months after reaching Lisbon of ‘a complication of disorders’.43 In Tom Jones he left a masterpiece that continues to fulfil, in the rich varieties of conversation and exercise in which it involves its readers, his last and greatest ambition as an exponent of the novel form: ‘that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see’ (XIII. i).
Thomas Keymer
NOTES
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, new edition (1905), p. 332 (5 July 1834); extract in Claude Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 259. Coleridge’s other perfect plots were those of Oedipus Rex and The Alchemist, on the first of which Fielding plays – rather less wholesomely than Coleridge allows – in constructing his own.
2. ‘Orbilius’, An Examen of the History of Tom Jones (1749), 5.
3. Old England, 27 May 1749; Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1749), 252; both quoted in Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (eds), Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 168, 178. The next year the Gentleman’s quoted Old England’s approval ‘that the French have shown their wisdom by suppressing that book, which to our shame was greedily swallowed here, (though wrote against)’ (Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1750), 177, summarizing Old England for 7 April).
4. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 127 (letter to Astraea and Minerva Hill, 4 August 1749).
5. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), s.v. Novel. On the variable eighteenth-century pitch of the word, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 25–8.
6. Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 440, quoting Joseph Spence’s letter of 15 April 1749 to William Burrell Massingberd. For the contemporary value of this sum (to which Millar reportedly added £100 on witnessing sales), see below, n. 7 to V. vii.
7. The History of Charlotte Summers, The Fortunate Parish Girl, 2 vols (1750), I, 6. For the significance of Charlotte’s surname, see Tom Jones, XVIII. vii.
8. An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751), 13.
9. Critical Review, II (October 1756), 276, reviewing Christopher Anstey’s Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse (and alluding to Pope’s Epistle to Burlington, line 26).
10. ‘Prefatory Memoir to Fielding’ (1820), quoted in Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology, p. 237.
11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 8.
12. Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2001), p. 90.
13. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, p. 42 (undated letter to Aaron Hill).
14. Joseph Andrews / Shamela, ed. Judith Hawley (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 49.
15. As well as playing on Hamlet, II. ii. 392–5 (‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral…’), Fielding also recalls Scriblerian jokes about genre such as the title of John Gay’s play The What D’Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (1715).
16. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, quoting J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Time (1828), I, 124n.; Smith is reporting the reminiscences of a great-aunt, Amey Hussey. For the muff and the jest-book, see below, note 2 to IV. xiv and note 3 to XI. viii.
17. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 170 (ch. xv).
18. Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 261–310.
19. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New et al. (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 88 (II. xi).
20. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 442, quoting a letter from Thomas Birch to Lord Orrery, 30 September 1748.
21. Henry Fielding, The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 120 (No. 5, 2 January 1748). It was probably this generous puff for Clarissa that made Richardson send Fielding, the following autumn, an advance volume from the final instalment.
22. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, p. 280 (letter to Lady Bradshaigh of 8 February 1754).
23. Henry Fielding, The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 210 (No. 14, 28 January–4 February 1746).
24. Tobias Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day and O. M. Brack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 23.
25. An Address to the People of England (1745), quoted by Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15.2 (1981–2), p. 148; the allusion is to Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires (1738), i. 160.
26. Simon Varey, ‘Samuel Richardson Serves His Country’, Book Collector, 41.2 (1992), pp. 257–8; Daniel Defoe, revised by Samuel Richardson, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 4th edn, 4 vols (1748), IV, 179.
27. Coleridge, Table Talk, 5 July 1834; extract in Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology, p. 259.
28. In his preface to a novel by his sister: see Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Linda Bree (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 460.
29. Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 230.
30. Quoted by Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 187.
31. True Patriot, pp. 133 (No. 3, 19 November 1745) and 309 (No. 33, 17 June 1746).
32. Paulson, Life of Henry Fielding, pp. 249–51; cf. Fielding’s Jacobite’s Journal (No. 6, 9 January 1748), p. 125.
33. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, p. 520.
34. Tobias Smollett, Poems, Plays and The Briton, ed. Byron Gassman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p
p. 23–6 (lines 35–6).
35. Paul Monod, ‘Tom Jones and the Crisis of Whiggism in Mid-Hanoverian England’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, in press), pp. 268–96.
36. Henry Fielding, Miscellanies III, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 68 (II. vi).
37. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 77.
38. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, quoting Old England for 3 September 1748.
39. Hugh Amory, New Books by Fielding: Commentary toward an Exhibition (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, 1987), p. 25.
40. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 21 (I. ii).
41. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. R. P. C. Mutter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 13.
42. The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. Arthur Murphy, 8 vols (1762), I, 46.
43. Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, ed. Tom Keymer (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 16.
Further Reading
EDITIONS AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Amory, Hugh, ‘Tom Jones Plus and Minus: Towards a Practical Text’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 25 (1977), pp. 101–13.
—, ‘Tom Jones Among the Compositors: An Examination’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), pp. 172–93.
—, ‘The History of “The Adventures of a Foundling”: Revising Tom Jones’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 27 (1979), pp. 277–303.
—, ‘Jones Papers: Envoi’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 28 (1980), pp. 175–80.
Fielding, Henry, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Fred-son Bowers, introduction and commentary by Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975; corrected paperback edn, 1977).
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCE
Morissey, L. J., Henry Fielding: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).
Ribble, Frederick G. and Ribble, Anne G., Fielding’s Library: An Annotated Catalogue (Charlottesville, Va.: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996).
Stoler, John A., ‘Henry Fielding: A Partly Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1978–1992’, in Bulletin of Bibliography, 50 (1993), pp. 83–101.
— and Fulton, Richard S., Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Criticism, 1900–1977 (New York: Garland, 1980).
BIOGRAPHY AND BACKGROUND
Battestin, Martin C., A Henry Fielding Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000).
— with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Rout-ledge, 1989).
— and Probyn, Clive T. (eds), The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Bertelsen, Lance, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (Basing-stoke: Palgrave, 2000).
Cleary, Thomas R., Henry Fielding: Political Writer (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984).
Paulson, Ronald, The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
— and Lockwood, Thomas (eds), Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
Williams, Ioan (ed.), The Criticism of Henry Fielding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
CASEBOOKS AND COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS
Battestin, Martin C. (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tom Jones: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
Rawson, Claude (ed.), Henry Fielding: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Rivero, Albert J. (ed.), Critical Essays on Henry Fielding (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998).
Simpson, K. G. (ed.), Henry Fielding: Justice Observed (London: Vision, 1985).
CRITICAL WORKS ON HENRY FIELDING
Alter, Robert, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Bell, Ian A., Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority (Harlow: Longman, 1994).
Campbell, Jill, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Hatfield, Glenn W., Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Hunter, J. Paul, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
Mace, Nancy A., Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996).
Rawson, Claude, ‘Henry Fielding’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 120–52.
—, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress, 2nd edn (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991).
Rosengarten, Richard A., Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
Smallwood, Angela J., Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate, 1700–1750 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).
Varey, Simon, Henry Fielding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
CRITICAL WORKS ON TOM JONES
Battestin, Martin C., The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
—, ‘Tom Jones and “His Egyptian Majesty”: Fielding’s Parable of Government’, PMLA, 82 (1967), pp. 68–77.
Bevis, Richard, ‘Fielding’s Normative Authors: Tom Jones and the Rehearsal Plays’, Philological Quarterly, 69 (1990), 55–70.
Brown, Homer Obed, ‘Tom Jones: The “Bastard” of History’, boundary 2, 7 (1979), pp. 201–33; reprinted in Brown, Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Carlton, Peter J., ‘The Mitigated Truth: Tom Jones’s Double Heroism’, Studies in the Novel, 19 (1987), pp. 397–409.
—, ‘Tom Jones and the ’45 Once Again’, Studies in the Novel, 20 (1988), pp. 361–73.
Folkenflik, Robert, ‘Tom Jones, the Gypsies, and the Masquerade’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1975), pp. 224–37.
Hudson, Nicholas, ‘Fielding’s Hierarchy of Dialogue: “Meta-Response” and the Reader in Tom Jones’, Philological Quarterly, 68 (1989), pp. 177–94.
Miller, Henry Knight, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and the Romance Tradition, English Literary Studies Monograph Series No. 6 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1976).
—, ‘The Voices of Henry Fielding: Style in Tom Jones’, in Henry Knight Miller, Eric Rothstein, and G. S. Rousseau (eds), The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 262–88.
Monod, Paul, ‘Tom Jones and the Crisis of Whiggism in Mid-Hanoverian England’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, in press), pp. 268–96.
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