Preston, John, ‘Plot as Irony: The Reader’s Role in Tom Jones’, ELH, 35 (1968), pp. 365–80. Reprinted in Preston, The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970).
Rader, Ralph W., ‘Tom Jones: The Form in History’; also John Richetti, ‘Reply: Ideology and Literary Form in Fielding’s Tom Jones’; both in D. H. Richter (ed.), Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999).
Rothstein, Eric, ‘Virtues of Authority in Tom Jones’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 28 (1987), pp. 99–126.
Sherman, Sandra, ‘Reading at Arm’s Length: Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones’, Studies in the Novel, 30.2 (1998), pp. 232–45.
Stern, Simon, ‘Tom Jones and the Economics of Copyright’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9.4 (1997), pp. 427–42.
Stevenson, John Allen, ‘Black George and the Black Act’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8.3 (1996), pp. 355–82.
—, ‘Fielding’s Mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge and the ’45’, Studies in English Literature, 37.3 (1997), pp. 553–71.
—, ‘A Loophole in the Law: The Case of Black George and the Purse in Tom Jones’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 94.2 (1995), pp. 207–19.
—, ‘Tom Jones and the Stuarts’, ELH, 61.3 (1994), pp. 571–95.
Note on the Text
Tom Jones was originally published on 10 February 1749, in six volumes, by Fielding’s usual bookseller Andrew Millar. A second edition followed on 28 February, incorporating 61 errata instructions from the first edition and some further minor corrections. A third edition of 12 April 1749, in four volumes, introduced about 2,000 textual changes, including extensive revisions to the later part of the ‘Man of the Hill’ interlude (VIII. xiii–xv; see Appendix). Fielding then seems to have marked up a copy of the third edition with a light stylistic revision of the entire text (about 1,200 changes altogether, not all of them authorial), which was published on 11 December 1749. This fourth edition, advertised in the press as ‘Carefully revis’d and corrected By HENRY FIELDING, Esq.’ (London Evening-Post, 12 December), was the last to appear in the author’s lifetime, and the only one announced as containing his revisions. The Penguin edition is based on this final version.
As a reviser of his own publications, Fielding’s tendency is almost always to concentrate or sharpen. Authorial phrasing is deftly honed in the fourth edition: ‘polite Lovers of eating’ becomes ‘Lovers of polite eating’ (I. i); ‘the Art of Cuckoldom’ and ‘Professors of Human Blood’ become ‘the Art of Cuckold-making’ and ‘Professors of Human Blood-shedding’ (XI. x; XII. x); ‘Doomsday Book, or the vast authentic Book of Nature’ becomes ‘the vast authentic Doomsday-Book of Nature’ (IX. i). Phonetic renderings of speech are intensified, so that Squire Western’s refusal to let Tom gain ‘a Brass Farthing’ by ingratiating himself at ‘Volk’s Houses’ becomes – Western’s rusticism increasing with his anger – ‘a Brass Varden’ at ‘Vok’s Houses’ (VI. x). There is no better indication of Fielding’s care as he revised than the clarity with which his allusions now swim into focus. Macbeth’s ‘struts and frets his Hour’ (VII. i) replaces the looser ‘storms and struts his Hour’ of the first three editions. Iago’s ‘Who steals my Purse steals Trash’ (XI. i) completes its painful journey, via ‘Who steals my Gold steals Trash’ in the second and third editions, from the first edition’s ‘Who steals my Cash steals Trash’ – a howler that had looked all the more embarrassing alongside Fielding’s mockery, a few chapters earlier, of Shakespeare’s bungling modern editors (X. i). A Ciceronian anecdote is scrupulously reassigned from Anacreon to Plato (X. ix), and Fielding even checked his Locke to adjust (from ‘the Colour Red’ in previous editions) his allusion to Locke’s anecdote of a man born blind but able to define ‘the Colour Scarlet’ by analogy with the sound of a trumpet (VI. i).
Exhaustive analyses by Fredson Bowers, Sheridan Baker and Hugh Amory have established that the fourth edition also introduces numerous typographical errors, and on several occasions compositorial eyeskip results in the omission of words, phrases or whole lines.1 These omissions have been silently restored in the Penguin edition, and other apparent printers’ errors have been corrected with reference to Fredson Bowers’s collation of all four lifetime editions, the emendations proposed by Sheridan Baker, and Hugh Amory’s critique of the texts established by both Baker and Bowers. Some local adjustments have been made to quotation marks and the presentation of included letters, but no attempt has been made to normalize alternative spellings or to reconcile the novel’s notorious inconsistencies of naming. Fielding may have intended the would-be highwayman known variously as ‘Anderson’ (XIII. viii), ‘Enderson’ (XIII. x) and ‘Henderson’ (XVII. vi) to have any one of these names, but no early edition is consistent here. It is equally possible that he wanted a Defoe-like vagueness of identity to hang around this character, or even that he was sustaining a quiet joke, through repeated misnaming, about what he elsewhere calls the ‘Trade… of Authoring’ (Joseph Andrews, II. i), with its hasty, blemished output.
NOTE
1. Fredson Bowers, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. lxii–lxxxiv; Hugh Amory, ‘Tom Jones Among the Compositors: An Examination’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), pp. 172–93; see also other essays by Amory listed in the present edition under ‘Further Reading’, and the extended case for the fourth edition made by Sheridan Baker in the Norton Tom Jones, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 642–9.
THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING.
IN FOUR VOLUMES.
By HENRY FIELDING, E∫q;
——Mores hominum multorum vidit——
LONDON:
Printed for A. MILLAR, over-against
Catharine-street in the Strand.
M.DCC.L.
To the HONOURABLE
George Lyttleton, Esq;1
One of the Lords Commissioners of the TREASURY.
Sir,
Notwithstanding your constant Refusal, when I have asked Leave to prefix your Name to this Dedication, I must still insist on my Right to desire your Protection of this Work.
To you, Sir, it is owing that this History was ever begun. It was by your Desire that I first thought of such a Composition. So many Years have since past, that you may have, perhaps, forgotten this Circumstance: But your Desires are to me in the Nature of Commands; and the Impression of them is never to be erased from my Memory.
Again, Sir, without your Assistance this History had never been completed. Be not startled at the Assertion. I do not intend to draw on you the Suspicion of being a Romance Writer. I mean no more than that I partly owe to you my Existence during great Part of the Time which I have employed in composing it: another Matter which it may be necessary to remind you of; since there are certain Actions of which you are apt to be extremely forgetful; but of these I hope I shall always have a better Memory than yourself.
Lastly, it is owing to you that the History appears what it now is. If there be in this Work, as some have been pleased to say, a stronger Picture of a truly benevolent Mind than is to be found in any other, who that knows you, and a particular Acquaintance of yours,2 will doubt whence that Benevolence hath been copied? The World will not, I believe, make me the Compliment of thinking I took it from myself. I care not: This they shall own, that the two Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say, two of the best and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously my Friends. I might be contented with this, and yet my Vanity will add a third to the Number; and him one of the greatest and noblest, not only in his Rank, but in every public and private Virtue. But here whilst my Gratitude for the princely Benefactions of the Duke of Bedford3 bursts from my Heart, you must forgive my reminding you, that it was you who first recommended me to the Notice of my Benefactor.
And what are your Objections to the Allowance of the Hon
our which I have sollicited? Why, you have commended the Book so warmly, that you should be ashamed of reading your Name before the Dedication. Indeed, Sir, if the Book itself doth not make you ashamed of your Commendations, nothing that I can here write will, or ought. I am not to give up my Right to your Protection and Patronage, because you have commended my Book: For though I acknowledge so many Obligations to you, I do not add this to the Number; in which Friendship, I am convinced, hath so little Share: Since that can neither biass your Judgment, nor pervert your Integrity. An Enemy may at any Time obtain your Commendation by only deserving it; and the utmost which the Faults of your Friends can hope for is your Silence; or, perhaps, if too severely accused, your gentle Palliation.
In short, Sir, I suspect, that your Dislike of public Praise is your true Objection to granting my Request. I have observed, that you have, in common with my two other Friends, an Unwillingness to hear the least Mention of your own Virtues; that, as a great Poet says of one of you, (he might justly have said it of all three) you
Do Good by stealth, and blush to find it Fame.4
If Men of this Disposition are as careful to shun Applause, as others are to escape Censure, how just must be your Apprehension of your Character falling into my Hands; since what would not a Man have Reason to dread, if attacked by an Author who had received from him Injuries equal to my Obligations to you!
And will not this Dread of Censure increase in Proportion to the Matter which a Man is conscious of having afforded for it? If his whole Life, for Instance, should have been one continued Subject of Satire, he may well tremble when an incensed Satirist takes him in Hand. Now, Sir, if we apply this to your modest Aversion to Panegyric, how reasonable will your Fears of me appear!
Yet surely you might have gratified my Ambition, from this single Confidence, that I shall always prefer the Indulgence of your Inclinations to the Satisfaction of my own. A very strong Instance of which I shall give you in this Address; in which I am determined to follow the Example of all other Dedicators, and will consider not what my Patron really deserves to have written, but what he will be best pleased to read.
Without further Preface then, I here present you with the Labours of some Years of my Life. What Merit these Labours have is already known to yourself. If, from your favourable Judgment, I have conceived some Esteem for them, it cannot be imputed to Vanity; since I should have agreed as implicitly to your Opinion, had it been given in Favour of any other Man’s Production. Negatively, at least, I may be allowed to say, that had I been sensible of any great Demerit in the Work, you are the last Person to whose Protection I would have ventured to recommend it.
From the Name of my Patron, indeed, I hope my Reader will be convinced, at his very Entrance on this Work, that he will find in the whole Course of it nothing prejudicial to the Cause of Religion and Virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest Rules of Decency, nor which can offend even the chastest Eye in the Perusal. On the contrary, I declare, that to recommend Goodness and Innocence hath been my sincere Endeavour in this History. This honest Purpose you have been pleased to think I have attained: And to say the Truth, it is likeliest to be attained in Books of this Kind; for an Example is a Kind of Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which Plato asserts there is in her naked Charms.5
Besides displaying that Beauty of Virtue which may attract the Admiration of Mankind, I have attempted to engage a stronger Motive to Human Action in her Favour, by convincing Men, that their true Interest directs them to a Pursuit of her. For this Purpose I have shewn, that no Acquisitions of Guilt can compensate the Loss of that solid inward Comfort of Mind, which is the sure Companion of Innocence and Virtue; nor can in the least balance the Evil of that Horror and Anxiety which, in their Room, Guilt introduces into our Bosoms. And again, that as these Acquisitions are in themselves generally worthless, so are the Means to attain them not only base and infamous, but at best incertain, and always full of Danger. Lastly, I have endeavoured strongly to inculcate, that Virtue and Innocence can scarce ever be injured but by Indiscretion; and that it is this alone which often betrays them into the Snares that Deceit and Villainy spread for them. A Moral which I have the more industriously laboured, as the teaching it is, of all others, the likeliest to be attended with Success; since, I believe, it is much easier to make good Men wise, than to make bad Men good.
For these Purposes I have employed all the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their favourite Follies and Vices. How far I have succeeded in this good Attempt, I shall submit to the candid Reader, with only two Requests: First, That he will not expect to find Perfection in this Work; and Secondly, That he will excuse some Parts of it, if they fall short of that little Merit which I hope may appear in others.
I will detain you, Sir, no longer. Indeed I have run into a Preface, while I professed to write a Dedication. But how can it be otherwise? I dare not praise you; and the only Means I know of to avoid it, when you are in my Thoughts, are either to be entirely silent, or to turn my Thoughts to some other Subject.
Pardon, therefore, what I have said in this Epistle, not only without your Consent, but absolutely against it; and give me at least Leave, in this public Manner, to declare, that I am, with the highest Respect and Gratitude,
SIR,
Your most Obliged,
Obedient Humble Servant,
Henry Fielding
Contents
BOOK I.
Containing as much of the Birth of the Foundling as is necessary or proper to acquaint the Reader with in the Beginning of this History.
CHAPTER I.
The Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast.
CHAPTER II.
A short Description of Squire Allworthy, and a fuller Account of Miss Bridget Allworthy his Sister.
CHAPTER III.
An odd Accident which befel Mr. Allworthy, at his Return home. The decent Behaviour of Mrs. Deborah Wilkins, with some proper Animadversions on Bastards.
CHAPTER IV.
The Reader’s Neck brought into Danger by a Description, his Escape, and the great Condescension of Miss Bridget Allworthy.
CHAPTER V.
Containing a few common Matters, with a very uncommon Observation upon them.
CHAPTER VI.
Mrs. Deborah is introduced into the Parish, with a Simile. A short Account of Jenny Jones, with the Difficulties and Discouragements which may attend young Women in the Pursuit of Learning.
CHAPTER VII.
Containing such grave Matter, that the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter, unless peradventure he should laugh at the Author.
CHAPTER VIII.
A Dialogue between Mesdames Bridget, and Deborah; containing more Amusement, but less Instruction than the former.
CHAPTER IX.
Containing Matters which will surprize the Reader.
CHAPTER X.
The Hospitality of Allworthy; with a short Sketch of the Characters of two Brothers, a Doctor, and a Captain, who were entertained by that Gentleman.
CHAPTER XI.
Containing many Rules, and some Examples, concerning falling in Love: Descriptions of Beauty, and other more prudential Inducements to Matrimony.
CHAPTER XII.
Containing what the Reader may perhaps expect to find in it.
CHAPTER XIII.
Which concludes the first Book; with an Instance of Ingratitude, which, we hope, will appear unnatural.
BOOK II.
Containing Scenes of matrimonial Felicity in different Degrees of Life; and various other Transactions during the first two Years after the Marriage between Captain Blifil and Miss Bridget Allworthy.
CHAPTER I.
Shewing what Kind of a History this is; what it is like, and what it is not like.
CHAPTER II.
Religious Cautions against shewing too muc
h Favour to Bastards; and a great Discovery made by Mrs. Deborah Wilkins.
CHAPTER III.
The Description of a domestic Government founded upon Rules directly contrary to those of Aristotle.
CHAPTER IV.
Containing one of the most bloody Battles, or rather Duels, that were ever recorded in Domestic History.
CHAPTER V.
Containing much Matter to exercise the Judgment and Reflection of the Reader.
CHAPTER VI.
The Trial of Partridge, the Schoolmaster, for Incontinency; The Evidence of his Wife; A short Reflection on the Wisdom of our Law; with other grave Matters, which those will like best who understand them most.
CHAPTER VII.
A short Sketch of that Felicity which prudent Couples may extract from Hatred; with a short Apology for those People who overlook Imperfections in their Friends.
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