The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics)

by Henry Fielding

  This whole concluding number of the True Patriot reeks of troubled conscience, and in its context we can see Fielding as using the comic tone and form of Tom Jones for purposes that are strongly irenic. It is a revealing fact that the most strenuous passage of polemic in Tom Jones (reprinted in the Appendix to the present edition) was deleted before publication, and survives only because restored, apparently by mistake, to the third edition. Otherwise, Fielding was moving fast in the direction of reconciliation. The Jacobites of the novel are represented indulgently, and at worst as misguided buffoons, while the domestic enactment of Jacobite absolutism, in Squire Western’s treatment of Sophia, has none of the tragic consequences arising in Clarissa. The most conspicuous villains of Tom Jones, indeed, are Hanoverian troops like the murderous Ensign Northerton, or of course the scheming Blifil, whose ruling passions of ‘Avarice and Ambition’ (VI. iv) recall Fielding’s anti-ministerial satires of the Walpole period: ominously, Blifil’s purchase of a parliamentary seat at the end of the novel implies the persistence of the old corruption. Fielding even seems to blur partisan identities in some respects, as though to register a sense of divided allegiance that was widely felt at the time. Sophia participates in her father’s Jacobite toasts yet bears a Hanoverian name (which also means ‘wisdom’), and at one point is even mistaken for the Pretender’s alleged mistress. For all his noisy professions of Hanoverian allegiance, as Ronald Paulson has noted, Tom’s romantic wanderings connect him subliminally with the Pretender himself, especially as chronicled in a series of anonymous romans à clef to which Fielding elsewhere refers by name, such as Ascanius, or The Young Adventurer (1746) and The Wanderer (1747).32

  Tom’s eventual inheritance of the Allworthy estate is certainly an affirmation of restored Hanoverian order, and Fielding cannot resist slipping in the truism that ‘a conquered Rebellion strengthens a Government’ (XVIII. v). But it is significant that Tom finally enjoys the blessing of Squire Western too. Tory backwoodsman and Whig tyro are linked in familial harmony, and in a new generation, by virtue of Tom’s marriage to Sophia; and indeed it is on Western’s estate, voluntarily made over to the couple, that the new generation will be raised. More important than the triumph of any one interest here is the burying of hatchets on all sides – a classic comedic ending marred only by the lingering Blifil threat. It remains a puzzle, to say the least, that in later life Charles Edward Stuart reportedly numbered Tom Jones – with, equally implausibly, Paradise Lost – among his favourite books.33 Perhaps the stupidity he shared with his Hanoverian cousins is explanation enough; if not, it may have been this final transcendence of partisanship that reconciled him to the novel.

  Tom Jones can achieve this final harmony, of course, only because its setting is exclusively English. It was in Scotland that the real bloodshed took place, and it was Scots blood that was spilt above all, and on both sides. ‘The sons, against their fathers stood, / The parent shed his children’s blood’, as Smollett lamented in ‘The Tears of Scotland’ (1746),34 and in this context Fielding’s vision of Tom and Partridge travelling together in great friendship while embracing opposite parties (VIII. ix) looks merely evasive. Other socio-political questions, however, prove more intractable in Tom Jones. As Paul Monod has pointed out, the novel was written at a time when Jacobite rebellion was not the only source of instability in the nation. Throughout the decade, European war had disrupted trade and led to a scarcity of credit, and economic dislocation was compounded by harsh winters and poor harvests, fuelling popular discontent. When the war at last ended in 1748, unemployment was aggravated by mass demobilization, accelerating a rise in levels of violent crime that Fielding addressed in different ways throughout the period.35 His novel Jonathan Wild (1743) was in part political satire, but on the surface it was the fictionalized life of a gangland capo, and linked these themes by fusing Wild’s identity with that of Walpole as similarly engaged in the great enterprise ‘of robbing the Publick’.36 Two years after Tom Jones, Fielding published a legal tract on the subject, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), in which progressive elements are intertwined with passages of draconian rhetoric. Notably, the Enquiry calls for an end to public executions (more than a century before their abolition), and partly attributes street crime to the trickle-down effect of high-life vice. Fielding might have been thinking of Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar, the depraved aristocrats of Tom Jones, when he writes that ‘in free Countries… it is a Branch of Liberty claimed by the People to be as wicked and profligate as their Superiors’.37

  By this time Fielding was a practising magistrate, having taken up office as justice of the peace for Westminster in November 1748, as he finished Tom Jones, and for Middlesex the following spring. His legal studies had begun in 1737, when his busy career as an Opposition playwright was curtailed by Walpole’s Stage Licensing Act, and he qualified as a barrister in 1740. Application to this new profession was the reason he gave in 1744 for lacking the time to write fiction, and as well as practising at the assizes across the west country each summer Fielding was also at work on a treatise entitled ‘An Institute of the Pleas of the Crown’. This ambitious work was far enough advanced by February 1745 to be advertised for imminent publication, but the likelihood is that Fielding abandoned the project soon afterwards. Its non-appearance remained a source of merriment to his enemies close to the publication of Tom Jones, and in September 1748 a bogus puff reported that Fielding would ‘be brought to Bed soon of a Law-Book, begotten upon himself by the Notes of an old Judge, which is to be published at the same Time with Six Volumes of his Novels, spick and span new’.38 The resumption of novel-writing had clearly become his priority, and the ‘Institute’ survives today as no more than a few manuscript fragments.39Tom Jones communicates in its very texture an exuberant sense of release from the straitjacket of lawyerly discourse, and Fielding loses no opportunity to parody, misapply or otherwise subvert the technical jargon of his profession. Just as the novel enabled him to transcend the strident propaganda of the True Patriot, so it could let him send up, or throw off, the ‘Institute’s’ solemn discriminations. Typically, the comedy is achieved through juxtaposition of clashing registers. ‘For the whole Duck, and great Part of the Apples, were converted to the Use of the Game-keeper’ is Fielding’s deadpan report when Black George eats stolen food (III. ii). The same parodic effect arises when a boyhood squabble between Tom and Blifil, involving insults, fibs and bloody noses, is recounted in high legalese: ‘Tom, though against all Form of Law, rejoined in Affirmance of the Words.’ (III. iv).

  Yet Tom Jones is also seriously concerned with issues about crime and punishment that would preoccupy Fielding in practice on the bench and in theory in tracts like the Enquiry. It is often observed that the dominant rhetoric of Tom Jones is that of an advocate whose narrative, while affecting to censure his hero’s misdemeanours and give enemies like Blifil their due, is always the case for the defence. Sometimes Fielding speaks as though tactfully playing a jury – ‘yet as Evidence may sometimes be offered in Mitigation, I shall set forth the plain Matter of Fact, and leave the whole to the Reader’s Determination’ (IV. vi) – and elsewhere he more openly directs the verdict. When Allworthy is minded to forgive Tom’s indiscretion with Molly – ‘in balancing his Faults with his Perfections, the latter seemed rather to preponderate’ – Fielding not only hopes that readers will agree, but condemns any who might dissent. In light of the circumstances, Allworthy’s opinion must be shared by ‘every other Person who hath any Idea of Friendship, Generosity, and Greatness of Spirit; that is to say, who hath any Traces of Goodness in his Mind’ (IV. xi).

  The moral world of Tom Jones is not always as simple as this, however, nor always one in which practical judgement and natural justice happily coincide. Fielding’s early allusion to the opinion of ‘some late Writers, that Mercy consists only in punishing Offenders’ (II. vi) – probably a sideswipe against journalists baying for blood during the trial of the Jacobite lords �
� is only the first of many reminders that the language of justice is always contested. As the novel develops, justice repeatedly fails in practice and looks problematic in theory, while the rival claims of severity and clemency make the consequences of judgement uncertain. Tom Jones has no character exactly resembling the flogging magistrate of Joseph Andrews, who imprisons the hero for stealing a twig, or the venal Justice Thrasher of Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), who ‘was never indifferent in a Cause, but when he could get nothing on either Side’.40 But the vision Tom Jones gives of the administration of justice in the nation is far from reassuring. As both head of his household and justice of the peace, Allworthy repeatedly gets verdicts wrong, acquitting the guilty and convicting a succession of innocents, including Jenny, Partridge and Tom, all of whom at different times he unjustly dismisses or expels. His name suggests all the virtues, and he has often been taken, as a previous editor of Tom Jones has put it, for ‘Fielding’s principal spokesman on ethical matters’.41 But ‘Orbilius’ was surely right to detect more than a dash of irony in Allworthy’s characterization, and on Allworthy’s failure to see through Captain Blifil he bluntly comments: ‘This convinces me, that the Author intended to make the benevolent Mr. Allworthy a Fool, and Perhaps to ridicule that Charity, which thinketh no Evil’ (Examen, p. 17).

  Too often, moreover, Allworthy thinks evil where none exists, and misapplies his power to disastrous effect. Meanwhile his local colleague on the bench, Squire Western, approaches the law primarily as a mechanism for preserving his own game. Attorneys are typified by the devious Lawyer Dowling, who plans to bribe a way into Parliament for Blifil and has no qualms about using the ‘Black Act’, a notoriously repressive statute of the Walpole years which introduced some fifty new capital crimes, in his efforts to get Black George hanged. Throughout all these mishaps and machinations, the term ‘justice’ is regularly used in a pejorative sense, to a degree remarkable in a writer who was poised to become, as his magistracy developed over the next five years, the lynchpin of the criminal justice system in the most populous city in Europe. Often Fielding uses the word in flat contradistinction to ‘mercy’, as though justice as commonly understood is simply at odds with the prevailing values of benevolence and good nature that he urges throughout the novel. ‘Master Blifil fell very short of his Companion in the amiable Quality of Mercy’, we learn as Blifil prepares his malicious destruction of the Seagrim family, whom Tom has been helping; ‘but he as greatly exceeded him in one of much higher Kind, namely, in Justice’ (III. x).

  Elsewhere Fielding writes of the ‘Vein… of Contrast’ as one of the primary structuring principles of his novel (V. i), as it also is, more locally, of his prose style. In this instance the contrasting characters of Tom and Blifil, with the antithetical values of charity and severity, are presented in unmistakable moral opposition. Another striking instance of the novel’s elegant symmetries, however, renders this particular contrast rather more problematic, while also pointing to the thematic centrality of crime and punishment throughout. As the first of Tom Jones’s three six-book phases draws to a close, Tom loses money he desperately needs, and is joined in the search for it by Black George, who – in one of Fielding’s trademark delayed disclosures – is then revealed to have had the bank bills in his pocket all along, having found them before Tom’s approach. Flippant approval is implied at this stage by the narrator’s adverbs – ‘being luckily apprized’ of the value of the bills, George has ‘carefully put them up for his own Use’ (VI. xii) – but, in the chapters to follow, extended discussion of this act from legal and ethical points of view fails to yield unambiguous authorial judgement. In technical terms, does the failure to return found goods constitute actual theft, and in casuistical terms might George’s act be justified, or at least mitigated, by necessity (as would certainly be the plea in a novel by Defoe)? A different spin emerges when Fielding goes on to speak of George as ‘running away with the 500l. from his Friend and Benefactor’ – now ingratitude is the point at issue – but even here authorial direction remains at the level of hint. Though considering a variety of possible responses, defined according to the reader’s position in an imaginary theatre, and thus according to social rank, Fielding refuses to endorse any, and settles instead for a generalized caution against hasty judgement: ‘Upon the whole, then, the Man of Candour and of true Understanding is never hasty to condemn’ (VII. i).

  Even when events are discovered at the end of the novel, Fielding remains more interested in putting rival points of view than in laying down the law himself. We know by now, after Dowling’s vindictive efforts, that George cannot be touched by criminal statutes; but how, nonetheless, should we judge him? And how, beyond this, should we judge his judges? Tom generously pleads George’s cause, talking of weakness as opposed to ingratitude, and urging forgiveness on grounds of temptation and need. For Allworthy, by contrast, George is unforgivably culpable, and Tom’s compassionate inclinations make him complicit himself: ‘Such mistaken Mercy is not only Weakness but borders on Injustice, and is very pernicious to Society, as it encourages Vice’ (XVIII. xi).

  Near the culmination of the first and final phases of the action, then, Fielding uses the case of Black George to ask fundamental questions about justice and its execution that are also everywhere relevant to the novel’s main plot. Moreover, in Allworthy’s further comment that ‘a Highwayman, compared to [George], is an innocent Person’ (XVIII. xi), Fielding deftly reminds us that just the same issue comes to the fore midway between these two points, at the end of the middle phase. In the final chapter of Book XII an actual highwayman – albeit a bungling novice, introduced as Anderson – attempts to rob Tom and Partridge. Like George, Anderson is acquitted by Tom on grounds of need, though Partridge urges summary execution. Far from wishing to prosecute, indeed, Tom voluntarily hands over, having first disarmed his would-be assailant, the little money he still has. To the outraged ‘Orbilius’, Fielding’s handling of this episode made it nothing less than ‘a Panegyric on English Highwaymen’ (Examen, p. 85). But Fielding’s narrator in fact remains studiously neutral, noting only that ‘The Highwayman… actually dropt Tears, or pretended so to do’, and posing the now familiar debate between severity and mercy as a matter of choice for readers as they evaluate Tom’s generous conduct: ‘Our Readers will probably be divided in their Opinions concerning this Action; some may applaud it perhaps as an Act of extraordinary Humanity, while those of a more saturnine Temper will consider it as a Want of Regard to that Justice which every Man owes his Country’ (XII. xiv).

  It might be argued that in a novel so emphatically committed to an ethics of benevolence the authorial verdict, though implicit, is clear enough: compassion must prevail over rigour in cases like this, and both George and Anderson have been rightly forgiven. It is Tom – not Partridge nor even Allworthy – who is the novel’s exemplar of goodness, and the indulgent tone of the text is on his side, as are its many warnings against ‘too hastily condemning all Compassion as a Folly, and pernicious to Society’ (VII. xv). Tom’s judgement seems vindicated, moreover, when Anderson comes good, and when his innocent children thereby escape ‘the dreadful Consequences which must have attended them, had [Tom] listened rather to the Voice of strict Justice than to that of Mercy, when he was attacked on the high Road’ (XIII. x).

  Yet this is not the whole story in a novel that represents human society, though in comic terms, as a fragile, vice-ridden, perilous structure, and as one in which ‘Prudence and Circumspection are necessary even to the best of Men’ (III. vii). Tom lacks this crucial virtue of prudence, as the text repeatedly reminds us, and only symbolically acquires it (in the person of Sophia) at the novel’s end. Prudence, moreover, is a virtue greatly cherished in Fielding’s legal writings, which though fully alive to social factors behind the crime wave – it is a ‘Scandal to our Polity… to see an industrious poor Creature, who is able and willing to labour, forced by mere Want into Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade
and Opulence’ (Enquiry, p. 172) – nowhere suggests that the proper response in such cases is to shirk prosecution or conviction. Fielding writes at a time when relatively small property offences were punishable by death, and when compassion often made victims reluctant to instigate proceedings. In this context, he shows none of the approval for tenderness of heart that he voices in Tom Jones, nor even the comic indulgence he bestows on Aunt Western – a woman so susceptible to brigandish charm that ‘she had even broken the Law in refusing to prosecute a Highwayman who had robbed her… of her Ear-rings… saying, “such handsome B—s as you, don’t want Jewels to set them off”’ (VII. ix). Instead, Fielding reserves his greatest scorn for those inhibited by compassion from prosecuting in capital cases, insisting that benevolence untempered by prudence endangers not only the individual but society as a whole, and as such is ‘the Benevolence of a Child or a Fool’ (Enquiry, p. 156). On this issue – so close to the cases of Anderson and George – his tones are unmistakably those of Squire Allworthy, as is his argument that, prosecution of crime being a public duty, ‘he who prevents or stifles such the Prosecution, is no longer an innocent Man, but guilty of a high Offence against the Public Good’ (Enquiry, p. 156). His rhetoric outdoes that of Allworthy, indeed, as he considers the Toms and Aunt Westerns of the real world: ‘Such Tenderheartedness is indeed Barbarity, and resembles the meek Spirit of him who would not assist in blowing up his Neighbour’s House, to save a whole City from the Flames’ (Enquiry, pp. 156–7).