The History of Tom Jones (Penguin Classics)

by Henry Fielding

  2. Thalestris: See above, IX. iii, n. 2.

  3. Capuchin: A hooded cloak, designed in imitation of monastic garb; on this fashion, see CGJ, p. 220 (No. 37, 9 May 1752).

  CHAPTER V.

  1. you cannot expect… afford you some Comfort: Throughout this letter, Sophia’s phrasing again glances parodically at Richardson’s tragic tale of familial prohibitions in Clarissa, with incongruous echoes of Clarissa’s characteristic attitude, style and diction. Cf., e.g., Clarissa, p. 547 (‘With infinite regret I am obliged to tell you that I can no longer write to you, or receive letters from you’); also p. 1161 (‘If it shall be found that I have not acted unworthy of your love and of my own character in my greater trials, that will be a happiness to both on reflection’).

  2. very Picture of the Man… Gunpowder-Treason Service: Referring to an etching of Guy Fawkes, the unsuccessful agent of a Roman Catholic plot to blow up Parliament on 5 November 1605, carrying a lantern; the etching appeared in eighteenth-century editions of the 1662 Prayer Book to accompany the annual service of commemoration and thanksgiving. Cf.HF’s play Rape upon Rape (1730), V. vi.

  3. Mr. Garrick: David Garrick (q.v. VII. i, n. 6) had made Hamlet one of his trademark roles since first playing the part in the 1742–3 season (having previously played the ghost); he was performing in Dublin in the 1745–6 season, when the present scene is set. ‘On the first appearance of the ghost, such a figure of consternation was never seen. He stood fixed in mute astonishment, and the audience saw him growing paler and paler. After an interval of suspense, he spoke in a low trembling accent, and uttered his questions with the greatest difficulty’ (Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick (1801), I, 46–7).

  4. the little Man so frightned himself: Garrick (whose small stature was often commented on) would give a start of terror that was evidently pronounced. Commenting on this passage, Boswell asked Johnson: ‘“Would you not, sir, start as Mr. Garrick does, if you saw a ghost?” He answered, “I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost”’ (The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), 16 August 1773).

  5. Who would think… committed a Murder: HF may be alluding here to the actor William Mills (who often played Claudius), having commented earlier on the incongruity of Mills’s ‘honest Face’ in the role of Iago (see above, VII. i, n. 9).

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. pressed and sent on board a Ship: i.e. forcibly recruited into naval service, like the hero of Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), ch. xxiv, and Trent in HF’s Amelia, p. 466 (XI. iii). Heavy use of impressment during the naval campaigns against Spain and France of 1739–48 provoked public controversy, but was reinforced by the 1743 case of Rex v. Broadfoot, which established the Crown’s right to impress on grounds of immemorial usage, and by the 1744 Act for the Speedy and Effectual Recruiting of His Majesty’s Land Forces and Marines (17 George II, c. 15), which sanctioned the conscription of ‘such able bodied Men as do not follow or exercise any lawful Calling or Employment’.

  2. legal Prostitution for Hire: A stock phrase in contemporary debates about marriage and money: C. J. Rawson (Notes and Queries 11 (1964), p. 298) cites examples from Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness (1727), 105, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Answer’ (1733) to James Hammond’s Elegy to a Young Lady, line 42.

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. Oroondates: The hero of Cassandre (1642–5), an heroic romance by Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de La Calprenède, was a byword for passionate magniloquence. Cf. Amelia, p. 337 (VIII, vii), where HF uses this same formula; also Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752), I. xii.

  CHAPTER X.

  1. that green-eyed Monster… Tragedy of Othello:

  O, beware jealousy;

  It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock

  That meat it feeds on. (Othello III. iii. 169–71)

  2. the Gate-house: The chief prison for the Westminster district.

  BOOK XVII.

  CHAPTER I.

  1. Tyburn: See above, VIII. i, n. 18.

  2. that supernatural Assistance: See above, VIII. i, n. 4.

  3. Genii: Alluding to the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, which in the earliest translations of 1704–17 introduced the word genie (HF classicizes the plural) as the English form of jinnee, the sprites or goblins of Arabic demonology. Cf. Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 8: ‘it was one of those malignant genies, that are mortal enemies to mankind, and always doing them mischief.’

  CHAPTER II.

  1. these minute Circumstances… Plutarch, one of the best of our Brother Historians: Opening his life of Alexander, Plutarch notes that ‘in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles’. In the novel, this aesthetic was associated above all with Richardson (cf. Clarissa, p. 1499: ‘there was frequently a necessity to be very circumstantial and minute’), but HF is careful to dissociate himself here from Richardsonian prolixity. Cf. also, on ‘minute causes’, Amelia, p. 17 (I. i).

  CHAPTER III.

  1. as one Acton was… and eat un: Western means Actaeon, the mythical huntsman (Acton being a suburb west of London, where HF’s cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later HF himself, lived). When during a hunt Actaeon surprised Diana and her nymphs bathing naked, she turned him into a stag to be devoured by his own hounds (Ovid, Metamorphoses, iii. 138 ff.).

  2. clap back: Leap or double back suddenly.

  3. Doctors Commons: See above, XV. viii, n. 1.

  CHAPTER IV.

  1. a Coronet on your Coach: Denoting nobility, as when Lady Davers pays a visit in Richardson’s Pamela: ‘I think the Chariot has Coronets’ (p. 380).

  2. I have broke many a Window… Parthenissa in it: On the fashion for scratching extemporized verses on panes of glass, see the scene based on this practice in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 125–6. Parthenissa is the eponymous heroine of an unfinished romance (1651–69) by Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery; her name is also adopted for its romantic associations by Bridget in Steele’s The Tender Husband (1705), II. i.

  3. Kingdoms and States… the human Form: Paraphrasing Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares, V. xvii. 3.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. Comb-brush: A lady’s maid; the generic name ‘Mrs Combrush’ is given to female servants in Thomas d’Urfey’s The Bath (1701) and Henry Carey’s The Honest Yorkshire-man (1736).

  2. the wise King of Prussia… perfect Neutrality: Frederick the Great (1712–86). In 1745, having secured the acquisition of Silesia and other aims during the War of the Austrian Succession, Frederick ended hostilities with Britain’s Austrian allies at the Treaty of Dresden, thereby enabling them to concentrate their forces against France and Spain. HF praises Frederick in this context in the True Patriot for 22–29 April 1746, calling Dresden ‘a Treaty to which the very Safety of Europe is strictly owing’ (p. 274).

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. Hedge-Tavern: A shabby and disreputable tavern; cf. HF’s cotranslation (1742) of Aristophanes, Plutus, the God of Riches, II. iv. 29.

  2. King’s Surgeon: See above, VIII. xiii, n. 1.

  3. some Witticisms about the Devil when he was sick: i.e. ‘the old proverb’ (V. i. 391) also cited in Thomas d’Urfey’s play The Virtuous Wife (1680): ‘When the Devil was sick, the Devil a Monk would be, / But when the Devil was well, the Devil a Monk was he’ (V. i. 393–4).

  BOOK XVIII.

  CHAPTER I.

  1. I have had some of the abusive Writings… utmost Virulence: A regular and legitimate complaint on HF’s part: cf. his preface to Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), in which he protests at being ‘reported the Author of half the Scurrility, Bawdy, Treason and Blasphemy, which these few last Years have produced’ (p. 460).

  CHAPTER II.

  1. the Regions of Billingsgate: See above, XI. viii, n. 1.

  CHAPT
ER III.

  1. the Black Act: A notorious catch-all piece of criminal legislation, passed in 1723 (9 George I, c. 22), which made many minor crimes against property into capital offences. See John Allen Stevenson, ‘Black George and the Black Act’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8.3 (1996), pp. 355–82; also JA, p. 286 (IV. v), where a precursor of Dowling, Lawyer Scout, prosecutes Joseph and Fanny for stealing a twig, ‘and with great Lenity too; for if we had called it a young Tree they would have been both hanged’.

  CHAPTER IV.

  1. Dr. Harrington and Dr. Brewster: Edward Harrington (1696–1757) and Thomas Brewster (1705–64), physicians of Bath, had both subscribed to HF’s Miscellanies of 1743, in which Brewster is singled out for special compliment (Companion, p. 33).

  2. Plato… Doctrines of Immortality: Plato, Phaedo, 107 b and 114 d, and Cicero’s discussion of Plato’s concept in Tusculan Disputations I. xxx. 74 and I. xxxi. 75; see also Tusculan Disputations, I. ix. 17.

  3. the sublimest of all Wisdom… Foolishness: Cf. Jonathan Wild (Miscellanies III, pp. 184–5 (IV. xiv)), in which a sermon is preached on 1 Corinthians 1:23: ‘But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.’

  4. Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth: Matthew 13:42, 13:50.

  5. Your Objection to Pluralities is being righteous over-much: ‘Pluralities’ refers to the practice of one clergyman holding several benefices, using part of the income to hire a curate to officiate in his absence, and retaining the rest. The text ‘Be not righteous over much’ (Ecclesiastes 7:16) had been famously used by Joseph Trapp in 1739 to defend the privileges of establishment Anglicanism against the Methodist George Whitefield, who responded with An Explanatory Sermon on That Mistaken Text, Be Not Righteous Over-much (1739). Parson Williams preaches self-servingly from the same text in Shamela (in JA, p. 23); see also HF’s Champion for 5 April 1740, which, ‘without being righteous over-much’, reproves those clergy who ‘make a Trade of Divinity’ (p. 271).

  6. small Tithes mentioned in Scripture… Matters of the Law: Cf. Matthew 23:23.

  CHAPTER V.

  1. As a conquered Rebellion strengthens a Government: A point HF applies elsewhere to the recent Jacobite rising: the Hanoverian establishment and ‘the whole Constitution have gained an additional Strength from the Attempt so wickedly made to overturn them’ (JJ, p. 44).

  CHAPTER VI.

  1. a poor Clergyman in Dorsetshire: Battestin proposes HF’s friend William Young (1689–1757), curate of East and West Stour in Dorset, often supposed to be the model of the unworldly Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (Wesleyan edn, pp. 936–9; Companion, pp. 168–9).

  2. Lymington… another Lawyer: Thought to be an allusion to Odber Knapton (1696–1746), an attorney of Lymington, Hampshire, and cousin of the well-known London booksellers of that name.

  3. had me to Size: i.e. called me to the Assizes (sessions of the county court).

  CHAPTER VIII.

  1. What the Devil and Doctor Faustus: A proverbial oath; cf. Elkanah Settle, The World in the Moon (1697), III. 353; Charles Coffey, The Merry Cobler (1735), I. iv. 89.

  2. an Action of Trover: See above, XII. iv, n. 1.

  CHAPTER IX.

  1. I know my Heart… sought Protection elsewhere: Sophia’s words again point up, with great economy, the comic parallel with Clarissa. ‘Oh that they did but know my heart!–It shall sooner burst, than… dictate a measure that shall cast a slur either upon them, my sex, or myself’, Clarissa says of her family (p. 141), believing throughout ‘that whether or not the parent do his duty by the child, the child cannot be exempted from doing hers to him’ (p. 235). When the family threaten to force her to marry Solmes, Lovelace asks her whether she has ‘any way but one to avoid the intended violence to my inclinations: my father so jealous of his authority’ (p. 167); she later finds herself (as her confidante puts it) ‘quitting your father’s house, and throwing yourself into the protection’ of this forbidden suitor (p. 330).

  CHAPTER X.

  1. the only Instance in which I could disobey you: i.e. the only command of yours which I could disobey. For ‘instance’ in this sense, cf. I. xiii (‘The Captain, at Mr. Allworthy’s Instance, was outwardly… reconciled to his Brother’); XVIII. xiii (‘Parson Supple, on whom, at the Instance of Sophia, Western hath bestowed a considerable Living’).

  CHAPTER XI.

  1. the frighted Thief sheds in his Cart: i.e. on his way to execution. Cf. Enquiry, p. 172: ‘that many Cart-loads of our Fellow-creatures are once in six Weeks carried to Slaughter, is a dreadful Consideration.’

  2. Such mistaken Mercy… encourages Vice: Cf. Enquiry, p. 156: ‘a benevolent and tender-hearted Temper very often betrays Men into Errors not only hurtful to themselves, but highly prejudicial to the Society… [N]otorious Robbers have lived to perpetrate future Acts of Violence, through the ill-judging Tenderness and Compassion of those who could and ought to have prosecuted them.’

  3. Harlequin: See above, V. i, n. 5.

  CHAPTER XII.

  1. They would fix a Dorimant, a Lord Rochester: Constancy is conspicuously spurned by both Dorimant, libertine hero of Etherege’s comedy of 1676, The Man of Mode (q.v. X. i, n. 2), and by the supposed original of Dorimant’s character, the Earl of Rochester (1647–80). See, e.g., The Man of Mode, II. ii. 203–5, and Rochester’s lyric ‘Against Constancy’.

  2. please the Lord Harry: Traditional oath of uncertain origin; the earliest instance recorded in OED2 is from Congreve’s The Old Batchelour (1693), II. i.

  CHAPTER THE LAST.

  1. in order to purchase a Seat… with an Attorney there: See above, XII. x, n. 1.

  2. Mr. Abraham Adams: The benevolent parson of Joseph Andrews (1742), whose character HF had sporadically resurrected in other works before Tom Jones: cf. Miscellanies II, p. 4; TP, pp. 151–7 and 201–7 (No. 7, 17 December 1745, and No. 13, 21–28 January 1746); JJ, pp. 330–6 (No. 32, 9 July 1748).

  Glossary of Latin Tags

  Fielding famously distinguishes in the preface to Joseph Andrews between the classically educated and ‘the mere English Reader’, and in Tom Jones he narrows the gap between the two by appending translations to many of the novel’s extended Latin quotations. In the present edition, further Latin quotations of interpretative or intertextual significance, or otherwise requiring special explanation, are identified and translated in the notes. Certain chapters are thickly strewn with very commonplace tags, however, and at these points we have avoided cluttering the text with unnecessary annotation. The glossary below gives translations of all Latin words and phrases occurring in Tom Jones, both literary and legal, where the meaning is not otherwise supplied in the text or notes, or is not obviously apparent from the context.

  As Sheridan Baker, Martin C. Battestin and Nancy A. Mace have shown, a high proportion of the unglossed tags in Tom Jones are traceable to William Lily’s A Short Introduction of Grammar (1527), a work that would have been imprinted on the minds of many readers as the standard Latin textbook in eighteenth-century schools. Lily’s Grammar used short passages from classical texts to illustrate grammatical rules, and in combination with other primers of the day, such as the illustrated lexicon Epigrammatum Delectus, it furnished pupils with a basic repository of stock quotations. Mace calculates that of the fifty-one Latin tags pompously employed by Partridge in Tom Jones, twenty-two come from either Lily’s Grammar or the Epigrammatum Delectus, while others are merely proverbial.1 The erudition on which he prides himself is actually very flimsy. Like other characters, including Parson Supple and even the Man of the Hill, Partridge regularly mangles or misapplies the Latin he flaunts, and at such points Fielding is not invoking particular classical intertexts so much as joking, in ways readily available to many early readers, about the hackneyed and hollow nature of his characters’ learning.

  Sometimes additional irony emerges, however, through knowledge of the underlying source. As Mace comments of the tag Tempus edax Rerum, ‘in both instances Part
ridge uses the phrase to imply that time heals all wounds, whereas in Ovid it suggests that time devours all things young and healthy. While readers with basic Latin education would recognize the phrase from Lily’s Latin grammar, then, more learned readers, who knew the original passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, would know that he has completely missed the sense of the Latin phrase’ (p. 93). In the following glossary, the original source of standard tags such as these is listed where relevant and identifiable. Where a quotation is produced more than once (and one especially hackneyed line, Virgil’s Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare Dolorem, occurs four times), it is given below in the form of its first appearance.