The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics)

by Henry Fielding

  4. the Rule prescribed by Horace… as seldom as possible: Ars Poetica, lines 191–2, or, as HF puts it in Jonathan Wild, ‘that Rule of Horace, Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus. The Meaning of which is, Do not bring in a supernatural Agent when you can do without him’ (Miscellanies III, p. 87 (II. xiii)). The rule is invoked again later, IX. v and XVII. i.

  5. Lord Shaftesbury observes… by a Modern: In his ‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’ (Characteristics, pp. 4–5).

  6. invoke a Ballad… Hippocrene or Helicon: In his Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), Richard Bentley argued that Homer’s original work was a series of ballads, which were collected into the Iliad and Odyssey as we know them centuries later. HF ridicules the argument in JA, p. 120 (II. i), and in A Journey from This World to the Next (I. viii) he has Homer himself deny that ‘he had really writ that Poem in detached Pieces, and sung it about as Ballads all over Greece’ (Miscellanies II, p. 37). On Hudibras, see above, IV. i, n. 3. The Hippocrene was a fountain on Mount Helicon, home of the muses, believed to be a source of poetic inspiration.

  7. the Opinion of Aristotle… Matter of Fact: A modern, neo-Aristotelian source for this exact quotation has not been traced; cf. Aristotle’s extended discussion of persuasive impossibilities and unpersuasive possibilities in Poetics, xxiv–xxv.

  8. the successless Armament of Xerxes… Charles the Twelfth of Sweden: Herodotus’ Histories, vii. 21–ix. 107, describes the immense forces assembled by the Persian king Xerxes for his invasion of Greece (480–479 bc), and their ultimate defeat. Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandri provides a history of Alexander the Great’s campaigns in the later fourth century bc, in which Greek forces again defeated numerically much stronger opponents. The battle of Agincourt (1415), at which the English bowmen of Henry V routed a large French army, provides a more modern example of the same phenomenon, as does the victory of Charles XII of Sweden over the Russian forces besieging Narva in 1700 (an episode narrated in Gustavus Adlerfeld’s The Military History of Charles XII, which HF had partly translated in 1740).

  9. that memorable Story… History of the Rebellion: A reference to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s posthumously published History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–4), a work HF includes in his censure of partisan historiography in Joseph Andrews, p. 201 (III. i). Clarendon relates how, six months before the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, the ghost of the Duke’s father, Sir George Villiers, appeared three times to a courtier at Windsor Castle, asking him to warn his son that ‘if he did not do somewhat to ingratiate himself to the people… he would be suffered to live [but] a short time’ (i. 89). Charles Drelincourt’s pious manual The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death (1675) gained new lease of life through the attachment to its fourth and numerous later editions of A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day after her Death (1706), a sensational pamphlet traditionally attributed to Defoe, in which the ghost obligingly avers that ‘Drelincourt… had the clearest Notions of Death, and of the Future State, of any who have handled that Subject’.

  10. that incredulous Hatred mentioned by Horace: Ars Poetica, lines 185–8.

  11. Trajan… Caligula: Roman Emperors. In contrast to the benevolent reigns of Trajan (98–117), Antoninus Pius (138–61) and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (161–80), those of Nero (54–68) and Caligula (37–41) were, as HF puts it elsewhere, ‘great tragical Farces in which one Half of Mankind was with much Humour put to Death and Tortures, for the Diversion of the other Half’ (CGJ, pp. 132–3 (No. 19, 7 March 1752)). Cf. below, XII. xii, n. 4.

  12. the History of Fisher: Relating the true story of Henry Fisher, an indebted attorney, who shot and robbed his friend and benefactor Widdrington Darby on 10 April 1727. Fisher was arrested, but escaped before trial, and seems never to have been recaptured (so HF can recount the story here ‘with little Danger’ of prejudicing a trial). A principal witness in the case was HF’s friend Richard Willoughby (see below, VIII. xi, n. 2), who was Fisher’s landlord. As Battestin notes in his extended account of the affair, there was a Drury Lane performance of Hamlet on 15 April (Wesleyan edn, pp. 402–3).

  13. Suetonius… Horrors of his Conscience: Freely translating Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, VI. xxxiv. 4.

  14. Quis credet… vel nemo: Adapting the defence made of his own work, in dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor, by the Roman satirist Persius (34–62) in Satires, i. 2–3: “‘Who will believe it?” No one, by Hercules! “No one?” Perhaps two, perhaps no one.’ The original reads ‘quis leget haec?’: who will read these things?

  15. Such Raræ Aves… Offence to the Reader: Concluding this paragraph’s tribute to his friend and patron Ralph Allen (see above, Dedication, n. 2), HF turns against Pope the poet’s account of his own satirical practice in ‘The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’ (1733), lines 77–9: ‘Whoe’er offends, at some unlucky time / Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme, / Sacred to ridicule…’. In complimenting Allen in his ‘Epilogue to the Satires’ (1738)–‘Let humble Allen, with an aukward Shame, / Do good by stealth, and blush to find it Fame’ (i. 135–6)–Pope’s couplet (distich) was so offhand as to seem almost satirical at Allen’s expense, damning with faint praise. For ‘Raræ Aves’ (rare birds), see above, IV. x, at n. 2.

  16. Conservation of Character: A rule expounded in Aristotle’s Poetics, xv. 15–19, and Horace’s Ars Poetica, lines 119–27. HF gives a comic illustration when Jonathan Wild picks a pocket while on the scaffold, thereby showing ‘the most admirable Conservation of Character in our Hero to his last Moment’ (Miscellanies III, p. 188 (IV. xv)).

  17. a most excellent Writer… its own Current: Another compliment to HF’s patron George Lyttelton (q.v. Dedication, n. 1), who expresses this view in Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul (1747).

  18. Tyburn: London’s place of public execution, at the present Marble Arch, where HF whimsically threatens below to set the closing scene of Tom Jones itself (XVII. i); see also the close of Jonathan Wild (Miscellanies III, pp. 186–9 (IV. xv)).

  19. As a Genius… the Surprizing: Adapting Pope’s mock-treatise Peri Bathous: or, Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), ch. v, where Pope is playing in turn on Horace’s Ars Poetica, lines 151–2; HF quotes this work again later (IX. i, at n. 5).

  20. the Character of a young Lady… of her Acquaintance: Generally understood to refer to Lady Charlotte Gaywit, a shallow gadabout portrayed by HF in his play The Modern Husband, which was hissed on its opening night of 14 February 1732. HF is probably quoting the approval of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), who had been an appreciative critic of the play in manuscript: see Companion, pp. 104–5, 183–4.

  CHAPTER II.

  1. obliged to pay them… as we Publicans are: By order of the annual ‘Mutiny Act’, innkeepers on whom troops were billeted were required to provide food and lodging at a rate of fourpence per day for a foot soldier and a shilling for an officer (Wesleyan edn, p. 408).

  2. Angels are painted… everlasting Love: Adapting Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d (1682), I. 338–41.

  CHAPTER III.

  1. Revulsion: Operation to relieve symptoms in one part of the body by acting on another (in this case by phlebotomy or bleeding).

  CHAPTER IV.

  1. the Barber of Bagdad, or he in Don Quixote: The garrulous barber of Baghdad narrates several tales in Antoine Galland’s popular Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1704–17); Master Nicholas the barber is a friend of Don Quixote who participates in several intended cures for the hero’s madness, including the destruction of his library of romances (Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I (1605), I. v ff.).

  2. Festina lente: As readers with even rudimentary classical training would have recognized, the Latin tags with which Benjamin’s speech is pretentiously and often inaccurately strewn are mainly derived from school primers. For further detail, and for translations and original sources
of phrases not separately noted below, see the Glossary.

  3. Lucus a non lucendo: A grove so called from the absence of light (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I. vi. 34). This celebrated etymological contradiction (lucus, a dark grove, being thought a derivation from luceo, to shine) became proverbial for anything precisely lacking the qualities expressed by its name: see, e.g., Addison, Spectator, No. 59 (8 May 1711).

  CHAPTER V.

  1. when a Man tells his own Story… one and the same: A point made regularly by Lovelace and others in Richardson’s Clarissa (see, e.g., p. 1038: ‘It is much better, Jack, to tell your own story when it must be known, than to have an adversary tell it for you’).

  2. to be his Bottle: i.e. for it to be his bottle; to buy the next round.

  3. Erasmi Colloquia… Tom Brown’s Works: Benjamin’s eclectic collection includes three standard classical texts for schools: Erasmus’s Colloquia (1516), outlining the principles of polite conversation in Latin; Ovid’s Tristia, poems in relatively easy Latin describing the poet’s sufferings in exile; and Gradus ad Parnassum, a manual with supporting illustrations from which students would memorize vocabulary and basic sententiae. Subsequent references are to the historian and antiquarian John Stow’s Chronicle of England (1580); Pope’s celebrated translation of the Iliad (1715–20); Addison’s much reprinted periodical, the Spectator (1711–14); Laurence Echard’s Roman History (see above, VI. ii, n. 2); and the Craftsman, a prominent Opposition newspaper which ran from 1726 to 1750. The Craftsman’s heyday was in the 1730s, when HF may possibly have contributed to its campaign against the Walpole ministry, and the early numbers were reprinted in a collected edition of 1731–7. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was widely reprinted in chapbook abridgement, and HF comments elsewhere on its ‘universal… Sale’ in this form (JJ, p. 178 (No. 13, 27 February 1748); he may also have been glancing pejoratively at this novel (full title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) in the opening sentence of VIII. i. The final references are to Thomas à Kempis’s ubiquitous fifteenth-century devotional text, The Imitation of Christ (a favourite with the virtuous hero of Joseph Andrews (I. iii), p. 66), and to the Works (1707, 1720) of the celebrated hack Tom Brown (1663–1704), a ‘Scribler’ at whose continuing popularity HF professed amazement ‘whilst the Writings of so excellent, so entertaining, and so voluminous an Author as Plutarch… are very little known’ (CGJ, pp. 75–6 (No. 10, 4 February 1752)).

  CHAPTER VI.

  1. that cruel Separation of the united Fraternities: Having been united in one corporation since the time of Henry VIII, barbers and surgeons were legally separated into two distinct corporations in June 1745 (18 George II, c. 15), the year in which Tom Jones is set. HF’s friend and physician John Ranby (q.v. VIII. xiii, n. 1) became governor of the corporation of surgeons.

  2. a very excellent Dream, and betokens much good Fortune: HF glances in this aspect of Partridge’s character at the celebrated astrologer John Partridge (1644–1715), whose annual almanac Merlinus Liberatus was famously parodied in Swift’s Predictions for the Year 1708 and other ‘Bickerstaff’ papers.

  3. Nil desperandum… auspice Teucro: Adapting Horace, Odes I.vii. 27: ‘Avaunt Despair! when Teucer calls to Fame, / The same your Augur, and your Guide the same’ (Philip Francis, A Poetical Translation of the Works of Horace, 2nd edn (1747)). Teucer, a Greek who fought in the Trojan war, was rejected by his father on his return for perceived disloyalty to his dead half-brother Ajax; he speaks these words to encourage his men as they set out in search of a new home.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. the Bell… any other heretical Sect: The charismatic Methodist leader George Whitefield (1714–70) grew up in the Bell Inn, which he remembers in A Short Account of God’s Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (1740), one of the publications satirized by HF in Shamela (1741). For HF’s many attacks on Whitefield and Methodism, see Companion, pp. 160–61, 241–2; also above, I. x, n. 2.

  2. He is indeed a very honest plain Man… still a very fine Woman: Referring to Richard Whitefield and his wife since 1729, Elizabeth. Battestin quotes a letter of April 1749 by Captain Lewis Thomas, who had met the ‘Coquet Landlady’ of the Bell: ‘How ye Devil came it into Fielding’s head to praise this Woman so exuberantly? If I was Master of the Bell Inn, I vow I should be absolutely Jealous’ (Wesleyan edn, p. 430).

  3. Mr. Timothy Harris: Innkeeper of the Red Lion at Egham in Surrey, who ‘hath particularly chosen the Lion for his Sign, as he doth in Countenance greatly resemble that magnanimous Beast, tho’ his Disposition savours more of the Sweetness of the Lamb’ (JA, I. xi, p. 87). Battestin reports that Harris died shortly before publication of Tom Jones, in October 1748 (Wesleyan edn, p. 432).

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. the Story from the Spectator… at the same Time: Addison recounts from ‘one of Scudery’s Romances’ the story of a pair of separated lovers who agree to think of each other at a certain time of day (Spectator, No. 241, 6 December 1711). The lunar consideration is HF’s embellishment.

  2. Tramontane: Literally one from beyond the mountains, i.e. a barbarian; cf. XV. vi, n. 5.

  3. the Miller with three Thumbs… up to his Knees in Blood: The association between Jacobitism and superstition was a standard feature of Whig propaganda. Battestin quotes from the bogus news columns of the Jacobite’s Journal HF’s report of prodigies from the Jacobite county of Staffordshire, where ‘there are at present several Millars with two Thumbs’ (No. 13, 27 February 1748, quoted in Wesleyan edn, p. 440), and this joke looks back to Addison’s mockery in the Freeholder (No. 24, 12 March 1716) of the 1715 edition of the popular manual Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy: ‘a Miller… shall be born with two Heels on one Foot, and… shall be Instrumental in delivering the Nation. A Boy shall be born with three Thumbs, and shall hold three King’s Horses, while England shall three times be Won and Lost in one Day’ (The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 141 n.).

  4. Briareus… with his hundred Thumbs: In Greek myth, a giant with 100 hands who helps Zeus defeat the Titans. Cf.HF’s play Don Quixote in England (1734), in which Quixote brags that no knight on earth can frighten him, ‘tho’ he had as many Hands as Briareus’ (II. iii).

  5. tall long-sided Dame… Monster of Virgil: Referring to the goddess Fame, described in Part II (1664) of Butler’s Hudibras thus: ‘There is a Tall Long-sided Dame, / (But wondrous light) ycleped Fame’ (II. i. 45–6). Virgil’s account of the many tongues and mouths of Fame as paraphrased here occurs in Aeneid, iv. 181–3.

  6. James or Charles: Referring to Partridge’s allegiance, as a Jacobite, to James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), the Old Pretender, or his son Charles Edward (1720–88), the Young Pretender.

  7. Ward’s Pill… the desired Effect: Mocking the extravagant claims made by Dr Joshua ‘Spot’ Ward (1685–1761) for his kill-or-cure nostrums. Pope calls Ward (in ‘The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’ (1737), line 182 n.) ‘a famous Empiric, whose Pill and Drop had several surprizing effects’–effects that look less surprising when one remembers that antimony and arsenic were among the principal ingredients. HF regularly satirizes Ward elsewhere (see Companion, p. 157), but turned to him in desperation in his final illness, and inserted in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon a public apology, implicit but handsome, for his previous mocking allusions (p. 17).

  CHAPTER X.

  1. that Picture drawn by Otway… almost without any Evidence: Referring to the witch met by Chamont in Thomas Otway’s tragedy The Orphan (1680):

  I spied a wrinkled hag, with age grown double,

  Picking dry sticks and mumbling to herself.

  Her eyes with scalding rheum were galled and red;

  Cold palsy shook her head, her hands seemed withered;

  And on her crooked shoulders had she wrapped

  The tattered remnant of an old stripped hanging,

  Which served to keep her carcass from the cold. (II. i. 244–9)<
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  Addison quotes this passage in a number of the Spectator devoted to the defence of old countrywomen accused of witchcraft (No. 117, 14 July 1711), and allusions to the Jacobean statute ‘against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealing with evil and wicked Spirits’ (1 James I, c. 12) were a standard feature of anti-Stuart propaganda, which regularly cited the repeal of this statute in 1736 (9 George II, c. 5) as a contrasting instance of Hanoverian enlightenment. By making belief in witches an article of his Jacobite ‘Creed’, Partridge follows the first Stuart monarch of England, James I, notoriously the author of Daemonologie (1597); see also the comparable belief of Captain Veale in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, pp. 95–6 (27 July 1754).