The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics)

by Henry Fielding

  Fielding’s acute interest in the transmission of meaning, and in the vagaries of transmission, is not simply a theoretical concern, or a response to general conditions. More specifically, he continues to engage here with practical issues arising from Richardson’s fiction. Parodying Pamela in his burlesque Shamela (1741), Fielding had brilliantly exploited the indeterminacy generated by Richardson’s first-person method, in which characters narrate their own stories according to their own perspectives and desires, and no authorial voice is on hand to supervise interpretation. What if Pamela is an unreliable narrator, Shamela subversively suggests, whose account of herself as a divinely protected and rewarded innocent is not neutral truth but a smokescreen for avarice and ambition? Does Richardson’s novel then mean what it seems to say, or does it mean the reverse? Readers, the implication is, can choose at will. In the following years Fielding became fascinated by Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8), a much more complex work in which narrative was now divided between multiple narrators. Far from converging harmoniously on the same explanation of motives, causes, and rights or wrongs, moreover, these narrators articulate competing versions of the underlying action, all of them discernibly flawed. Though the publication of Clarissa in three large instalments did not begin until December 1747, by which time much of Tom Jones had been written, Richardson had been privately circulating manuscript drafts for the previous three years, and Fielding seems to have picked up an outline sense of the novel in progress. It is unlikely to be through mere serendipity that (especially in the plot concerning Squire Western and Sophia) Tom Jones so closely tracks Clarissa’s themes of parental authority and filial rebellion, forbidden courtship and forced marriage, and expulsion from the father’s house to a wilderness beyond. He may even have intended to synchronize publication of Tom Jones with Clarissa’s concluding instalment, and in late September 1748 the simultaneous appearance of both works ‘about the middle of November’ was predicted by one usually reliable insider.20

  Above all, Fielding’s response to Clarissa concerned questions of signification and form. In his periodical the Jacobite’s Journal for 2 January 1748, he gave Richardson’s masterpiece its earliest notice in print, resuming Shamela’s focus on the instability of meaning generated by first-person epistolary narration, but in newly admiring tones:

  With what Indignation do I therefore hear the Criticisms made on this Performance. Clarissa is undutiful; she is too dutiful. She is too cold; she is too fond. She uses her Father, Mother, Uncles, Brother, Sister, Lover, Friend, too ill, too well. In short, there is scarce a Contradiction in Character, which I have not heard assigned from different Reasons to this poor Girl; who is as much the Object of Compassion as she can be, and as good as she should be described.21

  In allowing the novel’s warring characters to put their own points of view without authorial adjudication, as Fielding makes clear, Richardson had left readers free to understand his heroine in various ways. The result was interpretative chaos of a kind that, in its alternative narrative procedure, Tom Jones sought to limit but not wholly annul. No one could ever read Blifil as the hero of Tom Jones, as some readers had demonstrably made a hero of Clarissa’s arch-villain, Lovelace. But approaches to the novel that stress Fielding’s absolute direction of the reader’s interpretation and judgement neglect the fact that his authorial persona, though certainly omnipresent, is far from omniscient or omnisufficient. This implied author (as the device is sometimes called) regularly disclaims knowledge and insight, finds problems too intractable to offer judgements, and commits himself to explicit opinions that are at odds with implicit indications. Sometimes – in one of his favourite ‘low’ terms, and if such a thing is possible in a work of fiction – he simply fibs. With this arch, playful and utterly compelling narrative voice, Tom Jones held out an offer of guidance that was clearly to be handled with care. It thereby cast the reader in much more than a passive role – ‘for tho’ we will always lend thee proper Assistance in difficult Places’, as Fielding warns at one point, ‘… thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this great Work, to leave thy Sagacity nothing to do; or that, without sometimes exercising this Talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our Pages with any Pleasure or Profit to thyself’ (XI. ix).

  Both novelists seem to have found in their devolution of authority to the reader an enactment of political principle, albeit an enactment that remained uneasy. Richardson’s readers were to be, as he privately told one of them, ‘Sovereign’ in their judgement of the text, with a freedom to decide for themselves that he wished in theory to uphold, even while often regretting the consequences in practice.22 Fielding’s refusal to be a ‘jure divino Tyrant’ in his narration, though jokily violated by frequent lurches into dictatorial mode and the royal ‘we’, was similarly true to his management of the text overall. And this posture coincided neatly with the explicit politics of Tom Jones: a strident commitment ‘to the glorious Cause of Liberty’ (VII. xi), with a corresponding hostility to divine-right absolutism as ‘the most pernicious Doctrine which Priestcraft had ever the Wickedness or the Impudence to preach’ (XII. xiii).

  This theoretical commitment to a politics of limited and contractual authority, based on consent and the preservation of rights, was given urgency by events unfolding as both Tom Jones and Clarissa were written. In August 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (the ‘young Pretender’ or ‘young Chevalier’ in Tom Jones) raised the Jacobite standard in the western highlands of Scotland, aiming to restore the dynasty displaced when his grandfather James II had fled into exile at the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. Influential highland clans rallied to the Stuart cause, and the Jacobites garnered further recruits as they marched south through lowland Scotland and north-west England, defeating government forces at Prestonpans in September, staging triumphal entries into Edinburgh and Manchester, and reaching Derby, just 127 miles from London, on 4 December. A mass of active support could not be mobilized, however, and the synchronized French invasion for which the Jacobites hoped – ‘Ten thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Suffolk. Old England for ever!’ (XI. ii), as one of Fielding’s characters prematurely, and absurdly, exults – did not materialize. The brief occupation of Derby turned out to be the zenith of the rising, and nothing was to come of the panic created when news reached the capital on 6 December – ‘that memorable Day’, as Fielding later wrote, ‘when the Rebels having, as it was thought, slipt the Duke’s Army, were feared to be approaching this City by hasty Marches; and when this Apprehension, joined to that of an immediate Invasion from France, had thrown all Men into the most dreadful Consternation’.23 Even as Londoners trembled, the Jacobite army embarked on a tactical retreat, and was pursued to the highlands in the following weeks by government forces under the Duke of Cumberland, son of the Hanoverian monarch George II, and a general of brutal effectiveness. Cumberland had returned from campaigning in Flanders to deal with the crisis at home, and though no great tactician – ‘if he had lost his head in battle’, wrote Tobias Smollett, ‘the damage with regard to his powers of reflection would have been scarce perceptible’24 – he had overwhelming force at his disposal. Charles Edward’s support, meanwhile, was leaking away. In April 1746 the rebellion was ruthlessly extinguished at the battle of Culloden, leaving Jacobitism a spent force, albeit one still perceived as significant in the hysteria occasioned by the trial and execution of the Jacobite lords (Lords Lovat, Kilmarnock and Balmerino; Cromarty was reprieved) and by residual outbreaks of Jacobite disaffection in Staffordshire and elsewhere during the elections of 1747.

  To its supporters, Jacobitism promised not only to re-establish a divinely ordained right of hereditary succession, but also to roll back a culture of financial and political corruption that had become entrenched during Sir Robert Walpole’s long administration of 1721–42. As one of the Jacobite proclamations declared in 1745, with deft allusion to the anti-Walpole satire of Alexander Pope, ‘It could never be said justly, till
of late Years, that not to be corrupted is the Shame.’25 To Whig-Hanoverian opponents, however, Jacobitism threatened not virtuous renewal but a dangerous resurgence of Stuart autocracy, in which the liberties enshrined in the constitutional settlement of 1689 would again fall victim to the retrograde forces of popery and arbitrary power. To Fielding’s Tom, as the Man of the Hill recalls his distant experiences of the Glorious Revolution, it is inexplicable ‘that so soon after this convincing Experience, which brought our whole Nation to join so unanimously in expelling King James, for the Preservation of our Religion and Liberties, there should be a Party among us mad enough to desire the placing his Family again on the Throne’ (VIII. xiv).

  Richardson’s response to all this must have been complicated by his somewhat shadowy past as a printer for Jacobite interests, but as the Forty-five progressed he lent officials practical advice in the task of decoding enciphered Jacobite messages, and after its end he was probably the author of a history condemning ‘a Rebellion so unnatural’.26 His zeal was nothing, however, to that of Fielding. Shortly after the battle of Prestonpans, Fielding sprang to the breach on behalf of the coalition ‘Broad-Bottom’ administration, and rapidly became the ministry’s key producer of anti-Jacobite polemic. In October came three hastily penned tracts (A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender) of just the kind we might imagine distracting the Whiggish sister of Squire Western, who is ‘deeply engaged in reading a political Pamphlet’ (X. ix) as Sophia steals away from her father’s house. Fielding’s major contribution to the Hanoverian cause was a weekly broadsheet, The True Patriot, and The History of Our Own Times, which was launched in early November 1745, just as the Jacobite army crossed the Tweed into England, and ran until June 1746. In the aftermath of the rebellion, and closer to the publication of Tom Jones, this stringent and sometimes ferocious periodical gave way to the more genial irony of the Jacobite’s Journal (December 1747–November 1748).

  Exactly how these works of Fielding’s left hand affected the composition of Tom Jones is uncertain. But they can hardly have shortened a period to which he later referred, when dedicating the novel to his ministerial patron, as ‘the Labours of some Years of my Life’. Several inconsistencies suggest an interruption in composition slightly more than a third of the way through the text. Although Books VII–XII of Tom Jones bristle with allusions to the Forty-five, which Fielding at one point calls ‘the Rebellion in the North’ (VIII. v), these references jar oddly with Aunt Western’s comment in Book VI that events ‘look so well in the North’ (VI. iv). Aunt Western can only refer to something else: the northern front in mainland Europe of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), in which Britain was part of a coalition against France and Spain. Fielding’s few glancing references to Jacobitism before this point (such as the ‘jure divino Tyrant’ passage and the seditious name, ‘the Chevalier’, of Squire Western’s horse) are not to the rebellion specifically, and could have been later touches. Martin C. Battestin has persuasively argued from this evidence, and from the abrupt, offhand irruption of the Forty-five in Book VII – ‘the Reader may perceive (a Circumstance which we have not thought necessary to communicate before) that this was the very Time when the late Rebellion was at the highest’ (VII. xi) – that Fielding had written Books I–VI before the Pretender landed. He then may not have resumed Tom Jones for a year or more. Another sign of improvisation in this phase of the text is a warp in the time-scheme when the Jacobite invasion of England in early November occurs within three weeks of Tom’s dalliance with Molly Seagrim on ‘a pleasant Evening in the latter End of June’ (V. x). Coleridge may have remembered turning to Tom Jones after Clarissa as ‘like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’,27 but Fielding’s central action, alongside the Forty-five in England, gets bogged down in soggy late autumn.

  None of this means, however, that Fielding’s incorporation of the Jacobite rising was mere opportunism, or thematically irrelevant to Tom Jones. Invasion scares had been circulating well before July 1744, when Fielding made clear in public that he had not yet begun a new novel,28 and in planning Tom Jones thereafter he could perfectly well have anticipated the rebellion to come or intended to explore it as a potential event. (Walter Scott was to do something similar, though retrospectively, in his counter-factual Redgauntlet (1824), which hypothesizes a renewed Jacobite rising of 1765.) The concentration of explicit references to the Forty-five in the novel’s central section (and there is little more in the closing section than in the first) may have more to do with Fielding’s meticulous structuring of Tom Jones than with contingencies of composition date. Like Clarissa, this is a novel of three distinct and demarcated parts, its first six books set in the rural innocence of Paradise Hall, the next six concerning the wanderings that follow the hero’s expulsion, and the final six embroiling him, as he reaches London, in a metropolitan world of vice and gain. Whatever the pattern of explicit allusions, Tom Jones involves from start to finish a thematic preoccupation with questions of legitimacy and inheritance, rebellion and restoration, tyranny and freedom, of exactly the kind that were posed in practice by Charles Edward’s attempt on the throne. As Ronald Paulson puts it, ‘the central paradigm of Tom Jones is the historical event of the Forty-five’,29 and here again the comparison with Clarissa is revealing. At a time when political theory was typically conceived and debated by analogy with domestic relations, both novels could set the process in reverse, using conflicts of parental authority and filial resistance to reflect – though without the hard outlines of allegory – on public concerns.

  In Clarissa, Richardson is reticent about the political implications of a plot in which the heroine’s rebellion against her corrupt family, the aptly named Harlowes, is followed by destruction at the hands of a seductive but despotic invader, Lovelace. Tom Jones, however, makes the historical progress of the rebellion its actual backdrop. The Jacobite Squire Western angrily debates the issue with his Whig-Hanoverian sister, and the allegiances of other characters are clearly marked – though never carried, significantly, to the point of bloodshed. Tom insists that ‘The Cause of King George is the Cause of Liberty and true Religion’ (VIII. ix), but fortunately his readiness to volunteer comes to nothing. In their enthusiastic toasts to Charles Edward’s exiled father, ‘the King over the Water’ (VII. iv), Squire Western, Partridge and the novel’s other Jacobites resemble the armchair loyalists of whom Charles Edward later remarked that he would do for them ‘what they did for me; I shall drink their health’.30

  Throughout Books VII–XII, the movement of troops and the circulation of rumour define the scenery of Tom Jones, and delicate analogies are floated between the games of cat and mouse played out by the rival armies and those of the protagonists themselves: ‘some Folks who have given other Folks the Slip, may get to London before they are overtaken’, as Sophia is told (XI. vi). Torn between her Jacobite father and a Hanoverian lover, Sophia finds herself ‘in greater Danger than the Nation’ (VI. xiv), while the patriarchal despotism of this father (which Fielding neatly contrasts with the lenient government urged by the Whig Aunt Western) alarmingly enacts, on the human scale, his constitutional principles of absolute right. By contrast, Sophia’s eventual marriage to Tom, a model of noble conduct and public spirit who nevertheless lacks legitimacy of descent, lays Whiggish emphasis on authority by contract, election and choice as opposed to dynastic title. Fielding warns readers against writing off any incident as ‘impertinent and foreign to our main Design’ (X. i), and even digressions that have often been thought to fragment the unity of Tom Jones, such as the ‘Man of the Hill’ episode in Book VIII and the gypsy interlude in Book XII, make perfect sense in the political context. With his recollections of Stuart tyranny in the 1680s, and specifically the brutal suppression of Monmouth’s Whig rebellion of 1685, the Man of the Hill sets the ongoing public crisis, as well
as the novel’s domestic ructions, in long historical perspective. Tom’s encounter with ‘his Gypseian Majesty’ is a more complex part of the novel, finding in the gypsy community a microcosm of political absolutism that is far more appealing than Squire Western’s, and provoking anxiety in Fielding’s narrator ‘lest some Advocate for arbitrary Power should hereafter quote the Case of those People, as an Instance of the great Advantages which attend that Government above all others’ (XII. xii).

  All these layers of political allusion add a further dimension to Fielding’s use of the term ‘History’ in the title of his novel, and to his analogy between himself and ‘those Writers, who profess to disclose the Revolutions of Countries’ (II. i). It would not be entirely fanciful to claim that The History of Tom Jones, like the broadsheet True Patriot, was ‘the History of our own Times’ – so long as one accepts, as Fielding himself exuberantly did, that the writing of history is never objective or neutral. Emphatically, the True Patriot and Tom Jones give Whig accounts of, and make Whig interventions in, the politics and society of the 1740s. But they do so with enormous differences of balance and tone. Perhaps the most disturbing writing ever to flow from Fielding’s pen is a paranoid number of the True Patriot composed at the height of the crisis, a lurid vision of rampaging clansmen and roasting protestants in which London is tyrannized ‘with all the Fury which Rage, Zeal, Lust, and wanton Fierceness could inspire into the bloody Hearts of Popish Priests, Bigots and Barbarians’. Six months later – when the butchery at Culloden had made less clear just who were the real barbarians – Fielding uneasily defended himself from the charge of rabble-rousing. ‘The Paper principally intended to inflame this Nation against the Rebels,’ he maintained, ‘was writ whilst they were at Derby, and in that Day of Confusion, which God will, I hope, never suffer to have its Equal in the Kingdom.’31