The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics)

by Henry Fielding

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. Doctrine, which it is the Purpose of this whole Work to inculcate: Cf. above, Dedication: ‘I have endeavoured strongly to inculcate, that Virtue and Innocence can scarce ever be injured but by Indiscretion.’

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. Two to one are odds… at Foot-ball: Proverbial; cf. True Patriot, p. 428 (No. 17, 18–25 February 1746); also John Breval, The Play is the Plot (1718), II. i. 337.

  CHAPTER X.

  1. I have a Borough for him myself in my Eye: Dowling proposes to act as an election agent who will buy Blifil control of a parliamentary seat – a route Blifil still aims to follow in XVIII. xiii. Corrupt electoral practices of this kind are a regular target of HF’s satire: cf. his comedies The Fathers (written 1735, published 1778), III. 149–53, and Love in Several Masques (1728), V. 75–6.

  2. like Othello…’twas wonderous pitiful: Adapting Othello, I. iii. 132–61.

  3. Pone me pigris… Mr. Francis: Horace, Odes, I. xxii. 17–24; the English is from Philip Francis’s translation of 1743–6. ‘Lalage’ (simply ‘the Nymph’ in Francis’s rendering) is the name of Horace’s nymph.

  CHAPTER XI.

  1. come to the Parish: i.e. as recipients of poor relief; see above, I. iii, n. 5.

  CHAPTER XII.

  1. the whole Furniture of the infernal Regions… capable only of affecting the Upper Gallery: HF’s target here is the spectacular gimmickry specialized in by the theatrical impresario John Rich (q.v. V. i, n. 5). Cf. Champion (24 May and 3 May 1740), in which Rich’s audience is repeatedly ‘diverted with several Prospects of Hell’ (p. 337), ‘while from the lofty Regions of the Gallery Superior, where… all the viler Riff-Raff, the Tag-Rag, and Bobtail of the World, are mounted (perhaps by the noble Rich for this immediate purpose) above their Superiours, issue forth loud Acclamations’ (p. 302).

  2. Egyptians, or as they are vulgarly called Gypsies: Gypsies were thought to be of Egyptian descent, and ‘Egyptians’ remained the official term in legal discussions of vagrancy and vagabondage (as in HF’s Enquiry, p. 137). In the account of gypsy society that follows, HF seems to draw both on historical accounts of ancient Egypt and on topical satires associating Jacobitism with pharaonic despotism: see Martin C. Battestin, ‘Tom Jones and “His Egyptian Majesty”: Fielding’s Parable of Government’, PMLA 82 (1967), pp. 68–77.

  3. Æneas is not described… defixus in uno: ‘Thus, while the Trojan Prince employs his Eyes, / Fix’d on the Walls with wonder and surprise…’ (Aeneid, i. 495, as rendered in Dryden’s translation of 1697). Aeneas is transfixed here by scenes from the Trojan war, which he has recently witnessed, painted on the temple to Juno being built in Carthage.

  4. Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonini: Enlightened rulers of the Roman empire from 96 to 180, or collectively the ‘five good emperors’; the second Antoninus is better known as Marcus Aurelius. Of this era Edward Gibbon similarly opined that ‘if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus’ (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), ch. iii).

  CHAPTER XIII.

  1. Jones now travelled Post… the Rules of Longinus: See Longinus, On the Sublime, ch. xxxiv, which recommends speedy narrative where the narrated subject involves speed; also, on Phaeton’s speeding chariot, ch. xv. Tom is now riding at express speed (‘travelling post’) along the post-road from Coventry to London, changing horses at the stages named.

  2. non longe alienum à Scævolæ studiis: ‘Not far removed from the interests of Scaevola’ (Cicero, Ad Atticum, IV. xvi. 3); Quintus Mutius Scaevola (d. 82 BC) was a Roman jurist who made the first systematic compilation of the civil law.

  3. Communis, Alienus, immunis, variis casibus serviunt: ‘Common, strange, and free are governed by various cases’: Partridge responds to Tom’s Cicero quotation by correcting it with reference to a rule from Lily’s Grammar, where it appears as an illustration of this rule.

  4. Polly Matete cry Town is my Daskalon: Partridge’s maladroit pronunciation of a Greek saying quoted by Cicero in his Epistolae ad Familiares, ix. 7: ‘πoλλoí µαθηταí kρεíττovες ðiðαokαλωv’ (‘many pupils are wiser than their teachers’). HF alludes again in Amelia to ‘the common Greek Proverb – That the Scholar is often superior to the Master’ (p. 324 (VIII. v)).

  CHAPTER XIV.

  1. a certain Nation… to a high Pitch of Glory: i.e. France (see above, V. xii, n. 3).

  BOOK XIII.

  CHAPTER I.

  1. Come, bright Love of Fame… Ages yet to come: This complex mock-heroic invocation refers apparently to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. All the muses were daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory, for which ‘mnesis’ is a Greek synonym), and Calliope is associated particularly with the Hebrus river in Thrace, where she mourned her dead son Orpheus. In the following sentence, HF refers to the epic poets Homer, who supposedly came from Maeonia (Lydia), Virgil, who was born in Mantua, and Milton, who was living off Ludgate Hill in the 1660s while composing Paradise Lost (though Paradise Lost identifies Urania as its distinctive muse).

  2. my Charlotte: See above, IV. ii, n. 9.

  3. much plumper Dame: HF imagines a modern muse presiding over the marketplace for print; Battestin notes various general analogies with Dulness in Pope’s Dunciad (Wesleyan edn, pp. 683–4).

  4. Treckschuyte… Ufrow Gelt: Cod Dutch: a trekschuit is a barge; Juffrouw Geld would mean ‘Mistress Money’. Cf. HF’s The Author’s Farce (1730), where Luckless, a penniless author, protests to his landlady: ‘Pay you! That word is always uppermost in your mouth, as Gelt is in a Dutchman’s’ (I. ii).

  5. piece-mealed into Numbers: The serialization of lengthy folio works in cheap weekly or monthly instalments (‘numbers’) was a standard booksellers’ technique for maximizing sales and inflating prices: instalments were more immediately affordable, but the overall cost of the book was usually higher. HF satirizes the practice more fully in his 1734 revision of The Author’s Farce (II. iv) and in Joseph Andrews (p. 120 (II. i)).

  6. the prattling Babes… my Labours: i.e. HF’s children, whose support remains a concern in his posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (p. 15). Two children by Charlotte were alive at the time of writing (Harriet, 1737–66, and Henry, 1742–50); two by his second wife (William, 1748–1820, and Mary Amelia, January 1749–December 1749) were born as Tom Jones was completed and published.

  7. thy Aristophanes… thy Marivaux: On this comic-satirical lineage and the significance of its members for HF, see the relevant entries in Battestin’s Companion. The somewhat anomalous name here is that of Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763), author of La Vie de Marianne (1731–42), with whom William Warburton (q.v. n. 10 below) was to link HF as having jointly perfected the novel genre: see the extended footnote on romances (IV, 169) in his 1751 edition of Pope.

  8. thy Allen and thy Lyttleton: See above, notes 1 and 2 to Dedication (which addresses Lyttelton).

  9. thy Etonian Banks… sacrificed my Blood: HF attended Eton from 1719 until 1723 or 1724, presumably with occasional birchings. Cf. Jacobite’s Journal, pp. 268–9 (No. 23, 7 May 1748), in which an enthusiast for corporal punishment recalls that Spartan boys were occasionally ‘scourged to Death upon the Altar of Minerva: Now this Altar of Minerva, I take… to mean no other than the Block which was used in their Schools, (as it is at present in some of ours) for the Purpose of Flogging.’

  10. that Key… to thy Warburton, thou hast entrusted: A compliment to William Warburton (1698–1779), a learned and belligerent theologian who was close to HF’s patron Ralph Allen and was to praise HF in his 1751 edition of Pope (see Companion, pp. 156–7). Warburton had recently published a pretentious but blundering edition of Shakespeare (1747), and HF may have intended to exempt him here, having first let the implication hang for several books, fr
om his mockery of Shakespearian editors in the opening sentence of Book X.

  11. the Minister at his Levee: ‘The concourse of those who croud round a man of power in a morning’ (Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), s.v. Levee). The allusion is particularly to Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister 1721–42, whose notorious dispensation of patronage at such events is noted in a verse epistle addressed to him by HF in 1730: ‘Your Levée is but twice a Week…’ (Miscellanies I, p. 57).

  CHAPTER II.

  1. Dr. Misaubin: See above, V. vii, n. 3.

  2. To have the several Elements… Title and Wealth: The passage in play here, from Thomas Sydenham’s Treatise of the Gout and Dropsy (first published in Latin in 1683), is quoted by HF in the Champion for 3 May 1740 (pp. 300–301): ‘for what Advantage will it be to me after I am dead, that eight alphabetical Elements, reduced into that Order, that will compose my Name, shall be pronounced by those, who can no more frame an Idea of me in their Minds, than I can now conceive what those are to be who will not know such as were dead in the foregoing Age, &c.’

  3. 2d Odyssey ver. 175: Referring to the prophecy of Halitherses that after twenty years Odysseus would return to Ithaca, unknown to all (Odyssey, ii. 175).

  4. the particular Description of Cerberus… with such a Sop: Aeneid, vi. 417–23, in which a drugged honeycake is given to Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the river Styx at the entrance to the underworld. HF may also be remembering Dryden’s translation of 1697:

  No sooner landed, in his Den they found

  The triple Porter of the Stygian Sound:

  Grim Cerberus; who soon began to rear

  His crested Snakes, and arm’d his bristling Hair.

  The prudent Sibyl had before prepar’d

  A Sop, in Honey steep’d, to charm the Guard:

  Which, mix’d with pow’rful Drugs, she cast before

  His greedy grinning Jaws, just op’d to roar…

  CHAPTER IV.

  1. Non acuta… their sounding Brass: Horace, Odes, I. xvi. 7–8. The worship of Cybele, the Phrygian mother goddess, was characterized by the frenzy of her devotees.

  2. her Hoop sideways before her: The fashion for hoop-petticoats reached its extreme in the 1740s, when whalebone hoops of four or five metres in diameter were reported. Battestin quotes a similar satirical moment from The Enormous Abomination of the Hoop-Petticoat (1745): ‘First enters wriggling, and sideling, and edging in by degrees, Two Yards and a half of Hoop…’ (Wesleyan edn, p. 697).

  CHAPTER V.

  1. a compleat Set of Manuscript Sermons: i.e. nothing of saleable value. On the value of sermons in the contemporary marketplace, see Joseph Andrews, I. xvi–xvii, in which Parsons Barnabas and Adams are both rebuffed by booksellers: ‘I think those Persons who get by preaching Sermons, are the properest to lose by printing them’, Adams is bluntly told (p. 112).

  2. Vertù (… do not read Virtue): Primarily the fashionable connoisseurship of works of art or curios, though HF also glances in this paragraph at the Machiavellian concept of virtù as the ability to shape one’s own fortune by whatever means. For a comparable usage, see Pope’s 1743 Dunciad, iv. 567–70.

  3. Will’s or Button’s: Coffee-houses in Covent Garden, famed as meeting-places for literary wits in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Dryden had presided at Will’s in the Restoration period, and Steele dated numbers of the Tatler from there in 1709–10; it was eclipsed soon afterwards by the establishment of Button’s, which became the centre for Addison and his ‘little Senate’.

  4. meditating Speeches… for the Magazines: Parliamentary reporting was severely restricted, but the Gentleman’s Magazine (established 1731) circumvented the prohibition by carrying thinly disguised ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’, and the rival London Magazine used similar ruses. The speeches printed in the magazines bore little relation to those delivered: in the words of Samuel Johnson, who fabricated voluminous debates for the Gentleman’s in the early 1740s but attended parliament only once, ‘the mode… was to fix upon a speaker’s name, then to conjure up an answer’ (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (1897), II, 412).

  5. natural Philosophy… except her Monsters and Imperfections: The scientists of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (incorporated 1662) had been satirized in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Dunciad and elsewhere for their preoccupation with trivia and freaks. HF followed suit in Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R—l Society (1743, reprinted in Miscellanies I, pp. 191–204), a spoof of the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and later resumed his mockery of members who busied themselves ‘in hunting after Monsters of every Kind, as if they were at Enmity with Nature, and desirous of exposing all her Errors’ (CGJ, p. 157 (No. 24, 24 March 1752)).

  6. Broughton’s Amphitheatre: A controversial boxing arena off London’s Oxford Street, opened in 1743 by the celebrated pugilist John Broughton (1705–89) and closed by the legislature in 1750. For HF’s other allusions to Broughton, see Companion, p. 34.

  7. four Gentlemen of the Cloth… the whole Book: i.e. four liveried servants had been drinking porter (strong beer) and playing whist with reference to Edmond Hoyle’s definitive Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742; nine editions by 1748). On the fashion for whist, which Horace Walpole described in 1742 as having ‘spread an universal opium over the whole nation’, cf. CGJ, p. 305 (No. 56, 25 July 1752).

  CHAPTER VI.

  1. a Domino: A blank or neutral masquerade disguise, usually a loose hooded cloak of black silk; cf. the masquerade scene in Amelia, pp. 410–22 (X. ii–iii).

  2. Crape: A sort of thin worsted, used to make the gowns of the lower clergy.

  3. Lombard Street… White’s Chocolate-House: Lombard Street in the City of London was home to bankers, merchants and goldsmiths; White’s in St James’s Street (established 1693) was an opulent private club frequented by fashionable gamblers (cf. JVL, p. 51).

  CHAPTER VII.

  1. that Temple… High Priest of Pleasure presides: Referring to the Haymarket Opera House, where the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger (1659?–1749), Master of the Revels to George II, conducted masquerades–a form of entertainment that HF had been satirizing since his first publication, The Masquerade (1728), which is ironically dedicated to ‘H—D—G—R’. For HF’s treatment elsewhere of Heidegger and masquerades, see Companion, pp. 74–5, 240–41. The phrase ‘arbiter deliciarum’ means ‘overseer of delights’, and looks back to Pope’s Dunciad, in which Heidegger is compared to Nero’s depraved favourite, ‘Petronius, Arbiter Elegantiarum’ or ‘arbiter of taste’ (1728 version, i. 244 n.).

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. building Hospitals, &c.: Cf. HF’s Champion for 21 February 1740: ‘Amongst other Species of Charity for which this Age is justly celebrated, there is one which shines forth in a very particular Manner, I mean that of founding Hospitals’ (p. 193).

  2. Cawdle: A soothing lemon-based drink, thickened with egg yolk and sweetened with sugar, given especially to women in childbirth.

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. set forth in certain French Novels… Translations: The heroine of HF’s Shamela owns a copy of Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock (a pornographic novel first translated from the French in 1683 and republished by Edmund Curll in 1724) that typifies the trend alluded to here (JA, p. 31). New editions of Venus in the Cloister and The School of Venus… being a true Translation of the French L’Ecole des Filles were in press with the printer John Leake in 1745, but they appear to have been officially suppressed, or otherwise have failed to survive.

  CHAPTER XI.

  1. a new Play… an Engagement between the two Parties: Rowdy first nights were commonplace, but Battestin plausibly suggests that HF is alluding (anachronistically in view of his time-scheme) to the riotous reception of his friend Edward Moore’s The Foundling on 13 February 1748 (see Wesleyan edn, pp. 729–30; also JJ, pp. 171–2 (No. 12, 20 February 1748) and n.).

  CHAPTER XII
.

  1. The elegant Lord Shaftsbury… too much Truth: ‘For we can never do more injury to truth than by discovering too much of it on some occasions’ (Characteristics, p. 30).