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In Our Time
Fielding's Tom Jones
00:54:47
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great English comic novels.
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- [00:02]
Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
- [00:05]
Henry Power
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello. The History of Tom Jones A Foundling by Henry Fielding is one of the most influential of the early English novels, a favorite of Dickens and Coleridge, and a page turner both when it came out in 1749 and today. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays, and Tom Jones has the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest raconteur. And while the rakish Tom might be the villain in the hands of other authors, Fielding makes him the hero for his fundamental good nature, a caution not to judge anyone too soon, if ever. With me to discuss Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Henry Power, professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, Charlotte Roberts, Associate professor of English Literature at University College London, and Judith hawley, professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Judith, let's begin with Fielding's childhood, not dissimilar from that of his hero. Can you tell us about it?
- [01:16]
Judith Hawley
Well, on the face of it, Fielding's childhood was a very good one. He was born into a good family in 1707. His mother, Sarah, was well descended, a gentleman in her family. His father, Edmund Fielding, was a colonel and later rose through the army and was related to aristocrats. They claimed that they were related to the Habsburg royal family. And Henry Fielding had this huge protruding jaw, the sort of thing that Velasquez depicts in his portraits of the Spanish royal family. He was sent to Eton, where he met people like George Littleton and had a very good classical education. So on the face of it, it sounds like he was born into wealth and privilege. But his father, Edmund, was real ne'er do well. He was a gambler, womanizer, couldn't keep hold of money, very heavy drinker. And his mother's family was so worried about this profligacy that they had an estate set aside for Henry's mother and the children. There were eventually five children as well as Henry, and when, sadly, Sarah Fielding died when Henry fielding was about 11, the father took over the estate. He he married a Catholic woman, which was very problematic to the Protestant family, and he proceeded to spend the money. There was a terrible law case that Fielding's relatives brought against his father to try to get custody of the children and during the court case, it was alleged that Henry and his siblings had run completely wild and that Henry had actually committed incest with his sister Ursula. Now, there's no way of knowing now whether or not this happened. It could have been just a ghastly story told in order to get Henry out of the family and the estate, away from his father. But the fact is that the family split up. Henry was sent off to Eton, where he got a great education, but also ran wild. And as soon as he left Eton at the age of 18 or so, he eloped with a 15 year old heiress until that was broken up. So he had a very wild childhood.
- [03:22]
Henry Power
And he started to. To write plays.
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Judith Hawley
Yes.
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Henry Power
And his plays were part of the reason why the Censorship act was brought in. About plays, can you briskly tell us why the Censorship act came in and what effect his plays had on that act?
- [03:34]
Judith Hawley
Yes. So his plays were very controversial in subject matter and in preservation. They were often highly political. So not all of them, but a number of them, especially two in 1737, were critical of the royal family and also the then Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. And there's rumour of an even more controversial play that was attributed to Fielding. And so the government brought in the Theatrical Licensing act of 1737, which instituted very heavy censorship and control of the theatre. So that lucrative part of Fielding's career was no longer open to him. He then trained for the law and there were precedents in his family. His mother's side had lawyers who could help him and he was called to the bar in 1740. The same year he was also in the sponging house, imprisoned for debt. His father also was a sponging house. It's a wonderful name, isn't it?
- [04:29]
Henry Power
Very good.
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Judith Hawley
So it's. It's a kind of like a private enterprise, debtors prison, where you sponge for a bit.
- [04:37]
Charlotte Roberts
Bring it back, really.
- [04:39]
Henry Power
Okay, Henry. Novels were in their infancy then, and one of those that made feeling right fiction, as I understand, was Pamela or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson. Why was that work so important to him?
- [04:50]
Charlotte Roberts
Pamela is a novel by Samuel Richardson about a servant girl, Pamela Andrews, who is sexually harassed and propositioned by her lecherous employer, Mr. B. And she writes home a series of letters to her parents making clear her increasing distress. And in the end she, you know, she resists his advances and in the end she is rewarded for her virtue by marriage to her aggressor. And this was a sensation. It was one of the great kind of publishing successes of the first half of the 18th century. Very new in that it's. It's an epistolary novel. People reading it got the sense that these were genuine letters. And Fielding hated it. He hated it because he didn't like the sexual morality of it, this idea that female chastity was a thing to be bartered in exchange for marriage. And he didn't like the aesthetics of it either. He didn't like the kind of pedantry of all of the endless detail that Pamela puts into her letters, this kind of authenticating detail. She reproduces her laundry lists. She always seems to have a pen in her hand to describe everything that's going on. It's important partly because it's a major stepping stone in the history of the novel, and also because Fielding disliked it so much. It sparks something in Fielding in response to Pamela while he's in the sponging house. Possibly he's only in there for two weeks, but it may have been while he was in the sponging house in March 1741, that he writes this wonderful little book, Shamala, which is kind of his version of events. So whereas Pamela is virtuous and is kind of propositioned by Mr. B and is eventually rewarded with marriage, Fielding's Shamilla, who is in fact the same person, sets out to lure Mr. B, renamed Mr. Booby, into her trap. She's entrapping him in marriage. At the same time, she's engaged in an affair with the local parson. So Fielding creates this person who is a schemer. She's very open about her sexuality. She's the kind of polar opposite of Richardson's Pamela.
- [06:53]
Henry Power
So already, between the two of you, sexuality is taking front of stage, really?
- [06:59]
Charlotte Roberts
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think it's a. We'll come onto this, I'm sure, but it's a big theme you've already come onto. Well, we'll come onto it a lot more. It's a big theme of Tom Jones that Fielding is interested in sexuality as a, if not exactly a force for good, certainly not as a thing to be ashamed of. And I would say that's something he believes about both male and female sexuality.
- [07:22]
Henry Power
We've mentioned his plays, and he was very successful with his plays. How was his prose developing?
- [07:27]
Charlotte Roberts
After Shamala, Fielding almost immediately starts work on another novel. And this is Joseph Andrews. And this is the first thing of Fielding's that you'd call a novel, really. And again, the impetus comes from Richardson, comes from Pamela. So Joseph Andrews is Pamela's brother, and Fielding kind of flips the gender role, so that Joseph is propositioned by his female employer, Lady Booby. And when he rejects her advances, he's dismissed from her service. He's her footman, and he sets out on the road with this eccentric parson, Abraham Adams, and with his sweetheart, Fanny Goodwill. And they go on a series of kind of adventures in the style of Don Quixote. And this is where Fielding's prose really starts to develop. He's inspired by Richardson. There's something of Cervantes in the novel. There's also something of kind of biblical narrative in the novel, because Joseph, he's replaying the story of Joseph in Genesis, who resists the advances of Potiphar's wife. And perhaps most of all, Fielding is starting to write a version of Epic in English. So this is a. He says that Joseph Andrews is a comic. Epic poem, prose.
- [08:38]
Judith Hawley
There are a couple of other influences on his writing. The periodical writing is important. He develops a Persona like the Persona you find in Alison Steele's Spectator. He's Sir Hercules Vinegar. He's the champion. So that role of the narrator is coming out already. And he also runs a puppet theatre with his second wife, who is his first wife's former servant girl. So the way he plays with his characters as a narrator is sort of foreshadowed in his puppet theatre.
- [09:06]
Henry Power
Thank you. Charlotte Roberts, can you outline the plot of Tom Jones? Is that possible? It's 892 pages in the book I've got, so it's quite a task.
- [09:15]
Yeah, I'll give it a go. The story begins with Squire Allworthy, who is the richest and also the most virtuous and benevolent landowner in all of Somerset. And he comes home to his estate and he finds a baby boy asleep in his bed. He goes about finding out who's left the baby there and he finds a woman, Jenny Jones, who says that she's the person who left the baby. But all worthy volunteers to raise this little boy as his own. And he calls him Tom after himself and Jones after his mother. So Tom Jones grows up and he's always getting into trouble, poaching game from neighbouring estates. When he's a little bit older, he is having dalliances with village girls and probably getting them pregnant. And he's always getting into trouble. Everyone around him thinks that he's destined for a life of crime and a sticky end. But the thing that really comes through in all of these misadventures is that Tom has a good heart. He's misled by his passions, he's misled by his appetites. But fundamentally, he is a benevolent person who's trying to act for the best. And that places him in contrast with his companion Bliffel, who is Alworthy's nephew, who is outwardly pious and certainly very much in control of his passions and his feelings, but who is a malicious and vindictive nasty piece of work.
- [10:38]
So Tom falls in about page 42.
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Yes, that's right. I'm going to speed up, though, so don't worry at all.
- [10:44]
Maybe three leaps will do it.
- [10:46]
Absolutely. I think we can get there.
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Okay.
- [10:49]
So Tom falls in love with Sophia Weston, who's the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. But as a foundling, he has nothing. He has no particular inheritance or estate, and her father is determined that she's going to marry Blifil instead. And in addition to that, Blifil manipulates Allworthy using some of Tom's misdemeanors, and paints him as a sort of reprobate who should be cast out. And Allworthy does indeed send Tom away and say that he's never going to speak to him again. So we start part two of the novel, and Tom has been sent away from home. He's been separated from his beloved Sophia, and first he thinks he's going to run away to sea, and then he thinks he's going to join the army, but what he finds out is that Sophia has run away from home as well, to avoid that marriage to Bliffle. And she's on her way to London, so Tom decides to follow her there. So Tom has various adventures on the road, which is what the middle part of the novel concentrates on. And then in London as well, he meets this huge cast of characters, some of whom are there to help him, like Partridge, the barber surgeon, ex schoolmaster, who may or may not be his father. And some of his. The characters are there to waylay him or to hinder him or who. They sort of represent choices that he has to avoid. But the sort of tendency of the novel and the last two parts is to sort of answer sort of three questions. Is Tom going to end up with Sofia? Is he going to prove himself worthy of her and prove to her that he loves her? Is he going to be reconciled with Allworthy and be able to return to his home? And the sort of last question is, you know, how did he end up in all Worthy's bed all those years ago? Who were his parents? What is his origin? And while the answer to the first two of those questions might be quite obvious, after all this is a comedy. The last one is perhaps a little bit more of a mystery to unravel.
- [12:34]
You call it the word mystery. Fielding called it the word history.
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Yes, that's right. Fielding talks about history in this novel, and he talks about why he's chosen to call it a history. Partly he's wanting to make a distinction between a different kind of prose fiction, which Fielding calls romance, which might have sort of fantastical elements to it, or improbable storylines. And he says that Tom Jones is a novel which is based in truth, not in fact. He acknowledges that these. It's not a factual narration, that these events haven't actually happened. But he wants his novel to reflect a sort of fundamental truth about human nature, and he wants to distinguish it from other kinds of prose fiction. For that reason. He says he's a historian, but he also says that he's a very particular kind of historian. He says that he doesn't want to be like what he calls one of those sort of dull chroniclers who dedicates the same number of pages to the same number of years, regardless of whether anything happened or not. He says that he's going to intersperse his narration with poetical embellishments, but he's also going to leave things out. Sometimes he's going to skip over periods of time. So I think thinking about Fielding in Tom Jones as a historian who leaves.
- [13:44]
Things out a great deal, particularly of conversations and the development of almost every other word in most paragraphs.
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Absolutely. That kind of elaboration, that kind of poetic quality. Absolutely coming through.
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I think it's more conversational and poetical, but it can be both, can't it? Judas. We've touched on it. But can you develop what kind of boy Tom was?
- [14:04]
Judith Hawley
Tom is a rather hard boy to pin down, and the narrator spends a lot of time teasing readers or arguing with readers about who or what he is.
- [14:12]
Henry Power
He was thought by some persons to be a dreadful.
- [14:15]
Judith Hawley
To be a libertine, to be a rake. And the libertine is something of a bogeyman, stalking the 18th century after the excesses of people like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in the Restoration period. So a libertine is a womanizer who feels entitled to take whatever woman he can, lives a life free of moral restraint. And Tom, in some ways, is. Is a libertine. He has affairs with people. Charlotte mentioned village girls. But actually, to be fair to Tom, I think he only actually sleeps with three women in 892 pages, which is not a lot, really. And what Fielding often Does, or what the narrator, I should say does, is he puts Tom on trial and says readers will think he should be hanged. But then he contrasts him with other people, like his half brother, Blifil. And you see that Tom is always good natured and good hearted. He only ever sleeps with women because they seduce him and he feels it would sort of. It'd be rude not to. It's a kind of boeuf de politesse. He can't actually say no to them without being rude to them. So he's. He's given a lot of. A lot of rope, a lot of yardage and a lot of. A lot of leeway because he's good hearted.
- [15:29]
Henry Power
You say only three, let's leave it after them. But this includes declaring love to one person and then he bumps into the previous one on the way out of.
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Judith Hawley
The door and goes to bed with.
- [15:38]
Henry Power
Her and so on. So it's more complicated.
- [15:40]
Judith Hawley
It's more complicated than that. Yes. And Fielding doesn't let him off the hook and he punishes him severely. He ends up in prison. And, you know, the narrator tells us, if this were a tragedy, this would be absolutely the end of it. And so there is a way in which Tom goes on this sort of dark night of the soul. He goes on a journey in which he has to enter a realm of punishment to come out the other side.
- [16:03]
Henry Power
Fielding gives to Tom the quality that is so good natured that really, in the end, none of it's his fault and he gets off with it.
- [16:09]
Judith Hawley
Exactly. So it feels like a trial. And this is Fielding's experience in the law seems to come into it here. He's always making a case for Tom and saying that circumstances meant that he couldn't act any other way.
- [16:22]
Henry Power
Henry. Henry Parr, the Greek epic, play a part in this. Can you tell us how?
- [16:27]
Charlotte Roberts
Yes, in various ways. To start with, it's. Tom Jones is a development of this idea that he puts forward in Joseph Andrews of this new species of writing. He calls it the comic epic poem in prose, which he doesn't use exactly the same phrase in Tom Jones, but he calls it a prosai commie. Epic is the way he describes it.
- [16:47]
Henry Power
So he gets everything in?
- [16:49]
Charlotte Roberts
Yeah, just about. I mean, there is just about everything in Tom Jones, actually, which is an epic thing. Epic is this genre which contains everything. I think Fielding feels that quite strongly. So epic has this funny status in the 18th century in that it's regarded as the highest, the most important kind of literature, and yet no one's quite worked out how it fits into the 18th century, how this kind of ancient genre fits into a world where there are kind of comfortable soft furnishings and nice pastries and snuff boxes and this kind of thing. And so, generally speaking, the kind of epic energy gets diverted into mock heroic, into things like the Rape of the Lock or the Dispensary by Garth. And in a way, I think Tom Jones is an answer to the question of what might epic look like in the 18th century. So in what ways is it epic? It's a very symmetrical and regular and orderly piece of writing. And Fielding talks about epic as being a kind of very regular, well balanced, well ordered genre. It features a hero who's going on this important adventure. And I think, coming back to the idea of Tom and his qualities and his drawbacks, the thing we're always being told about Tom is that he has all these virtues, but he lacks prudence. He lacks prudence and wisdom. And, of course, the Greek word for prudence wisdom is Sophia. So he's going on a quest to attain. Yes, Sophia Weston, the heroine, but also prudence wisdom, the thing that will complete him as a hero.
- [18:22]
Henry Power
This quest for Sofia is a bit here and there, isn't it? Comes and goes. I mean, she, first of all has a quest for him when he's questing after somebody else and he goes to her for. There's money involved. I think you can unravel that a bit more.
- [18:37]
Charlotte Roberts
Yes. When they're on the road, Tom and Sophia, they're kind of constantly overlapping and missing each other on the road in as well.
- [18:44]
Henry Power
Looking for each other and missing each other.
- [18:45]
Charlotte Roberts
Yes, exactly. But I think it's, you know. Nonetheless, Tom is. He has. He has appetites which he indulges with other women. I'm not sure that I quite agree with Judith that it's all politess. I think Tom Jones is a creature of appetite as well.
- [19:01]
Henry Power
Do you agree with the number three? But this.
- [19:03]
Charlotte Roberts
I do agree with the number three. I mean, actually, it's part of the symmetry. Tom Jones is divided very neatly into three parts. There's a section in the countryside, there's a section on the road. There's a section in London joined into exact thirds. And there's a sexual conquest in each of the thirds, which kind of corresponds. So, yes, I think three is. I think three is right.
- [19:22]
Henry Power
Four, if you count the epilogue, I suppose, when we see Tom happily married.
- [19:27]
Charlotte Roberts
Yes. Okay. Yeah.
- [19:29]
Judith Hawley
So three out of wedlock.
- [19:31]
Henry Power
Three out of wedlock.
- [19:32]
Charlotte Roberts
But anyway, I think, yeah, Tom and Sophia are always kind of in each other's thoughts, even when she's furious with him, even when he's chasing other people. Anyway, that's a way in which Tom Jones is epic. The other thing I'd want to say is that he is, you know, he's an Odyssean figure. The epigraph on the title page of Tom Jones, which is More's Hominum multorum videt, is a kind of quotation from an opening line of the Odyssey. He saw the manners of many men. And, you know, Tom experiences partly because he has this strange status as a foundling. He meets people in high society, he meets the dregs of society. He spends time in prison. And it's very similar to Odysseus, who has all these extraordinary experiences on his journey from Troy back to Ithaca. And what they both do in the end, after all these experiences, is reclaim their birthright, or at least so we hope.
- [20:29]
Henry Power
The narrator is constantly present. I mean, dominating, really. He comes to the front of the stage every two or three pages and says, this is what's going to happen. Then it happens, and then he moves on it. But he's talking us through it all the time. What do you make of that?
- [20:47]
Yes, a lot of readers of Tom Jones have felt that that really strong and highly characterized narrative voice is somehow comparable to Fielding's own, and that we feel that the author is addressing us directly. So George Eliot, for example, the great 19th century novelist, said that when Fielding's narrator addresses us, it feels like Fielding himself is sort of pulling up an easy chair and holding forth to us, she says, in all the lusty ease of his fine English, which is a wonderful phrase and a wonderful way of describing it. But although we get that really strong sense of a single personality, almost another character within the novel from the narrator, his voice is also mercurial and quite slippery. Fielding is a wonderful parodist. So he's very, very good at mimicking other people's voices, picking up on the ways in which they use language. And he incorporates that mimicry into his narratorial voice as well, which seems to change, therefore, in kind of tone and attitude.
- [21:47]
Can you give us an example of that?
- [21:49]
Well, I think what one kind of really good example of that is that in those opening chapters which begin each book of the novel, where Fielding's narrator does address this directly, the relationship between the narrator and the reader there seems to change depending on which chapter it is. Sometimes he talks to us as if we're his friend or his fellow traveler. Sometimes he talks to us as if he's our servant and he's there to serve us. But sometimes he says that he's our king and that we have to do what he says, and sometimes he says he's our God, and he compares the reader to a little kind of reptile crawling on the face of creation who couldn't kind of dare to question the design that Fielding, the narrator, author, God, has kind of put in place in this novel. So it's shifting all of the time.
- [22:38]
Do you find it disconcerting, or obviously you find it wonderful?
- [22:40]
I do find it wonderful, but this is in many ways a slightly disconcerting novel when it comes to narration. We're told frequently through this test to not trust narrators. We don't fully trust the narrator of the novel because he's constantly withholding information from us or sometimes slightly lying to us by attributing motives to a character that turn out to be false. But everyone in the novel who narrates is also deceiving us as well. This is a characteristic of narration. So every time a character sets out to tell a story about themselves or something that they've encountered in this text, they will always invariably leave something out or manipulate that narrative in some way. And that's the case even if we're told that the character is really attempting to tell the truth. So slipperiness is a fundamental quality of narration in Tom Jones.
- [23:29]
Judith, let's go back to the opening chapters and this bill of fare. What's that all about?
- [23:34]
Judith Hawley
So he opens the bill.
- [23:35]
Henry Power
It's called Bill of Fare.
- [23:36]
Judith Hawley
It's called the Bill of Fare, and that's like a menu. So he opens the chapters of your turning up at a restaurant, at a very ordinary restaurant, nothing fancy, and the host in the restaurant is telling you what's available, what's on the menu, and he's going to serve all customers. And it's not just that the narrator is mercurial, it's also that he's aware that there are different readers who are going to want different kinds of things. And so some of them will like a bit of this and some of them will like a bit of that. And he's going to provide something for everyone. And the thing that he puts, the main thing that he puts on the menu for you is one thing, but it's very various. It's human nature. So thinking about what Henry's just said about the capaciousness of the novel and how it includes everything, another thing to bear in mind about Fielding is that he includes all aspects of Human life, people's good aspects, their bad aspects, and also that sense that people are both good and bad, that, like precious china, there could be a flaw in it which spoils it, but it's still beautiful and important to hold onto. So he's assuming then that we're going to consume the book, but that we'll be taking different things from it because we have our own different tastes and appetites, but also that what we're being given is something really kind of rich and complex.
- [24:53]
Henry Power
What did he carry over from his stage experience and great success to this novel?
- [24:59]
Judith Hawley
I think some of it is that some of his plays had that figure of the narrator, the author, on stage. They were plays within plays.
- [25:07]
Henry Power
As I understand it, he himself appeared on stage, introducing scene after scene.
- [25:11]
Judith Hawley
Yes. So you get that sense of the commentator on live action. And a lot of the most important chapters in the book could very well be staged. The amazing central section in the Inn at Upton, where pretty much all of the characters come in and out and doors open and close. It's very like a farce. You could imagine that being on a big stage with lots of doors and the audience sees everything, but none of the individual characters do, but the narrator pops up to tell you what's going on. So that's an important aspect of it. And I think also that sense of, again, the audience that you're pitching to, critics in the front row who are going to be booing and hissing the reptiles that Charlotte referred to, poor people stuck up right at the back of the gallery who'll be rooting for certain kinds of characters. People who, you know, polite, prudish ladies who won't be prepared to laugh because it'll give away that they really understand what the dirty jokes are about. So I think that that sense of the audience and of the structure of drama is there.
- [26:06]
Henry Power
We heard. Sorry, Henry, you were to comment.
- [26:07]
Charlotte Roberts
Well, yeah. The interesting thing as well, about the move from the theatre is that there's a nervousness about the different readers, the different critics that are involved. Because when Fielding's in the playhouse, he can gauge an audience's response and he really can't with Tom Jones. In fact, I think I'm right in saying the very middle sentence of Tom Jones, the start of book 10. This would be right, wouldn't it? Is reader, it is impossible to know what sort of person you are or thou art, I think, actually. So it's impossible for him to know who the reader is. And I think all of this stuff about the kind of master of an Ordinary. Or when he compare being the master of an ordinary. Or when he compares himself and his readers to fellow travelers in a stagecoach and he's telling them a story, there's an attempt to will back into existence this sense of a live audience, of the kind of social nature of theatre. Because, you know, Tom Jones sells its 2,500 copies, I think, in the first edition, and people go off and read them and actually he doesn't know. And he's deeply frustrated by the fact that he doesn't know what people are going to make of this.
- [27:17]
Henry Power
He doesn't get the feedback he got in a theatre.
- [27:19]
Charlotte Roberts
Exactly.
- [27:20]
Henry Power
Yes. Coleridge is one of the people who praised the plot as one of the three greatest in literature. What were the other two?
- [27:27]
Charlotte Roberts
As a matter of interest, the other two were. And this is a line that's recorded in Coleridge's Table Talk, so I don't know how much pressure we should put on it as a critical judgment, but it's interesting anyway. He said the three most perfect plots ever planned were Oedipus, Tyrannus by Sophocles, the Alchemist by Ben Jonson and Tom Jones. And the interesting thing about that is. Well, there are many interesting things about that. One is that the Tom Jones is unlike those two other plots. So those are both very intensive plots. They both obey the unity. So they both take place over the course of a single day. We focus relentlessly on the protagonist. So in Oedipus, we are just with Oedipus the whole time as he discovers the secret of his birth. Well, there's an obvious relevance to Tom Jones there, but it's not very like Tom Jones in structure. With the Alchemist, we're with these three kind of con artists for the whole day as they deceive various people and are then undone by their duplicity. Whereas Tom Jones isn't intensive, it's extensive. It takes in lots of different scenes and lots of different people, and Tom Jones, the character, disappears from our sight for quite long periods of time. So it's a very different kind of plot. And the other way in which it's different, actually, is that Fielding constantly. We've kind of touched on this already, but Fielding constantly draws attention to the fact that he's putting together this brilliant plot, that he's created this in another. I'm not sure if you mentioned this one, Charlotte, but as well as being like the universe or a country, Tom Jones is like an extraordinary machine where every cog and wheel is. Is kind of perfectly in place.
- [29:14]
Henry Power
Do we have any roughs of the way he did it? What do we have left? Is that an original manuscript?
- [29:21]
Judith Hawley
Sadly, there's no original manuscript, but we have some sense of when he composed certain bits because he was overtaken by history. Charlotte's already very interestingly mentioned history, but after he had started writing this book, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 happened, and so he incorporates that into his plot. So, on the one hand, the plot is beautifully organized, as Henry said, but on the other hand, there's this eruption, this big political emergency, and he actually breaks off from writing the novel to write a series of propaganda pieces attacking the Jacobites and saying, you know, that the nation is in peril.
- [29:56]
Charlotte Roberts
There's probably more we could say about the Jacobite rebellion. I mean, the kind of intersection between Fielding's plot and in particular the Sophia's escape from the clutches of her tyrannical father, who is, incidentally, a Jacobite squire, Weston, and then the Jacobite uprising, on the other hand, is quite interesting.
- [30:16]
Henry Power
So there's a lot going on. What we haven't come to yet, Charlotte, is the women in the case. Can you lead on that?
- [30:27]
Fielding's women characters in Tom Jones, they're funny and they're beautifully realised and they're engaging. Fielding can be dismissive of women in certain contexts, I suppose. He certainly believes that there are certain kinds of knowledge which are the preserve of men, and he can be quite mean about women who attempt to lay claim to those kinds of knowledge. So, for example, Sophia has an aunt, Mrs. Weston, who believes herself to be a great kind of political theorist, and she believes that she's in touch with kind of foreign policy and matters of court and state, and that's ridiculed quite severely. She's also ridiculed, incidentally, for her pretensions to classical knowledge, which was also a sort of preserve of men at this time. He can also be a little bit unpleasant when it comes to directing satire at women who he sees as sexually undesirable, particularly if they have pretensions to the contrary, of course. So there are moments which perhaps have, I guess we would might say now have dated less well about Tom Jones in its presentation of women. But for all of that, this is a novel in which women have agency. They have agency over the plot. So at the end of Tom Jones, it's two women characters, one who is present and one who is absent, who are revealed as the novel's great secret keepers. And it's by revealing information that has been withheld at an opportune moment by one of those women. That sort of brings about the happy denouement of the novel. And that means, of course, that those characters parallel the role of Fielding's narrator within the text. He also is a withholder of information who presents it at the opportune moment, so it gives them a kind of authorial agency within the text. It's also, and this is something which Henry has already alluded to, a novel which celebrates women's sexual agency. All of the women in this novel, even the very virtuous Sophia, are motivated, at least partially by desire and by, you know, love and a desire to yet to kind of engage with men. Yeah, absolutely, exactly. Jump into bed with Tom Jones. That's what Sophia wants. That's why she runs away from home, really. I think that probably a good 50%, maybe even the majority of main female characters in this novel engage in extramarital sex. And apart from the odd set piece lecture, they're not really criticised for that and they're certainly not punished for it. And I think that's something which perhaps might take some readers of this novel by surprise, perhaps who are more used to reading classic novels that were written in the second half of the 18th century or in the 19th century. The attitudes to female sexuality are really very different and quite refreshing, perhaps, for modern readers.
- [33:15]
Charlotte Roberts
Do we have to mention Sophia's muff at this point?
- [33:19]
Henry Power
Surely we do, Henry.
- [33:20]
Judith Hawley
Surely we do.
- [33:21]
Charlotte Roberts
This is one of the great running jokes of the book, which is that Sophia has a muff, that is to say, a piece of fur that she uses to keep her hands warm, and Tom, at quite an early stage in the novel, picks it up and kisses it and buries his face in it. And this is observed by Sophia's maidservant, who tells her about it. And from that point on it becomes this kind of key object that symbolizes their relationship. And there are constant references to Sophia's muff. It gets left behind in a. In a.
- [33:54]
Henry Power
Does this have a secondary?
- [33:55]
Charlotte Roberts
Oh, yes, yes. It barely has a primary.
- [34:02]
Judith Hawley
What they mean in contemporary.
- [34:04]
Charlotte Roberts
I think it's. I think it probably has a strong. The innuendo would have been stronger in 1749 than. Than it is now, in fact. And the thing that's really interesting about it is that Sophia has a. Has a. This is where we see that Sophia has a strong interest in her own sexuality, sexual agency. So after she discovers at an inn that Tom has slept with someone he's met there.
- [34:29]
Henry Power
It's Mrs. Waters, isn't it?
- [34:30]
Charlotte Roberts
It's Mrs. Waters, exactly. She gets him back by pinning her name to her muffin and leaving it in his bedroom. So he discovers it. But that is a pretty definite gesture from Sophia that, you know, that she is a sexual person who Tom Jones has.
- [34:48]
Henry Power
What does it say? She's still in the running or she's fed up with him?
- [34:51]
Charlotte Roberts
I think a little bit of both, isn't it?
- [34:53]
Judith Hawley
I think she is a warning shot. This is what you're giving up by dallying with Mrs. Waters. But then when it comes to it, there's a really strange way in which Sophia is very strong, but also very weak. And Richardson and Samuel Johnson both complained about the representation of Sophia. Why did he make a woman who's so insipid? So at the very end, when the happy ending is about to happen, she sort of refuses to marry Tom, or I couldn't possibly marry him. She won't express her desire publicly and she sort of has to be forced to do it. And I think that there's a way in which, on the one hand, this is a book about desire, about human nature, but it's also a novel about power and authority. And the position of women is partly a way of saying who's in charge? And this connects with the Jacobite rebellion. Is it going to be a tyrannical regime? Is the author a tyrant? What kind of right and agency do human individuals have? So it's both about sexuality in the position of women, but also these much larger issues to do with who's in power.
- [35:57]
Henry Power
Yes. There's one. He goes, as I said earlier, I just mentioned it, he tends to go up on these wonderful tangents and he'll have three pages on something which has got nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. One of them is describing details as if he were doing a painting of her. It's extraordinary. Yeah, Airbrushing and all.
- [36:15]
Judith Hawley
Airbrushes hair. And he does this in other novels, too. Joseph Andrews is described as if he were a painting. And in the case of Sophia, there's a way in which she. Sort of a portrait of his beloved dead wife, Charlotte. And then in Amelia, his third novel, which is very different in many ways, Charlotte turns into Amelia as well. So he's got this mental image of the perfect woman who he does. Yeah, airbrush and preserve as a sort of an icon of perfection and attributes a much heartier, more visceral desire to the older woman, like Lady Bellison and Mrs. Waters.
- [36:53]
Henry Power
Charlotte, I just wanted to come in because I think I have a sort of slightly different reading, perhaps to you, Judith, of the end of the novel and Sophia's response. Because it does seem so strange, doesn't it, that finally she has the opportunity to say yes to Tom Jones and to marry him, and she says instead, I'm not sure. I don't think so. I'm going to have to wait. I'm going to have to think about it. And she has to be kind of cajoled into getting married the very next day by her father.
- [37:18]
Her father cajoles.
- [37:19]
Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. More than cajoling, Squire Weston does everything with impetuosity and including that. But it's really, I think it's a moment. It's not a moment of shyness or kind of modesty on Sofia's part. It's a question of sincerity. Because Sophia says to Tom, when he begs her for forgiveness and says that he loves only her, that true sincerity can only be judged by God, and that the only way for human beings to judge whether someone is telling the truth is to examine a continuous tenor of their conduct over a long period of time. And the fact that Sophia says that proves that she has learned the lesson of the novel. That is what the novel tells us about judgment, that you can't judge a character based on a single action, and you certainly can't judge a character by attempting to kind of excavate them and look within them. He's anti interiority in that sense. But even though Sophia has kind of learned the truth of the novel and she's kind of reached a position of kind of moral seriousness within the text, her desire kind of still comes through. So when Squire Weston bursts in, we know that she's acting in response to her appetites. Because this is a novel in which characters constantly kind of understand what the sensible thing to do is and then don't do it because they want to do something else. And that's what Sophia does at the end of the text, I think.
- [38:39]
Was the novel a great success? And if so, what effect did it have on Fielding, his career?
- [38:43]
Judith Hawley
Judith it was a great success. It sold very well. It went into numerous printings, didn't it? Henry in his. In the first year.
- [38:50]
Charlotte Roberts
There are four editions in the first year, and I think it gets 10,000 copies get printed in the first year of its existence, which is a lot.
- [38:57]
Judith Hawley
It's a significant number, given the size of the readership. Fielding's next and last significant novel, Amelia, is very, very different. Different. It's much more like Richardson. I knew Henry talked very well about how Fielding was just appalled by the morality and by the aesthetics of Richardson. But he warmed to him and he ended up writing a novel called Amelia, which is about the life of a married couple and is much more sentimental. It did well for his career in a way, but by this time Fielding is a significant lawyer and also in really significant bagged health. Tom Jones was published in 1749. Fielding only lived till 1755. He suffered from what was then called dropsy, which is this sort of terrific swelling. They literally tapped, they set a tap in his stomach and drained off liters and litres of fluid. And he went to Lisbon, where he died and is buried. And there's a rather pompous tombstone erected in the 1830s to him.
- [39:58]
Henry Power
Tom Jones is 275 years old. Do you think he still works for a modern audience?
- [40:03]
Judith Hawley
It does and it doesn't. Charlotte referred to things that had not aged well. And so some of the attitudes to disadvantaged people, to class and to gender, don't age well. But it's a fantastically good story. It's exciting, it's got everything. It's got puppet shows, it's got, you know, I mean, what's not to like? It's both high and low. It's very classically learned and then it's bawdy and funny.
- [40:29]
Henry Power
Charlotte, what do you think is readable about it now?
- [40:32]
I think that this is a novel which is still so funny. I still laugh out loud when I read it, and I've probably read it maybe certainly more than five times now, but I still find things which are making me chuckle. It's relatable because I think that a lot of its messages are ones that, certainly, speaking for myself, still hold true today. This is a novel that tells us to stop introspecting, to stop. Stop becoming kind of, you know, self satisfied or self interested and instead to look outward and to kind of look socially. The last time I did this program I was doing it in lockdown in my study and how good it is to be back here in the studio with Henry and Judith and with you, Melvin, kind of living out the social dynamics of this text.
- [41:15]
Charlotte Roberts
I think we should read it now. I mean, I agree mostly because it's funny and it's wonderful, but also because we're living perhaps in a slightly mean spirited and intolerant moment. And this is such a tolerant and generous book. I mean, there are all sorts of different people from different walks of life doing some good, some bad, some wrong headed, lots of wrong headed things in this book. But you come away from it with a sense that the world is a good and interesting place always. And that mostly, with the exception of one or two very bad eggs, people are interesting and good as well.
- [41:53]
Henry Power
Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Judith Hawley and Charlotte Roberts and Henry Power. Next week, it's karma, the Indian religious and philosophical idea that links your past deeds with your future life. Thanks for listening.
- [42:05]
Judith Hawley
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few.
- [42:09]
Henry Power
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:12]
I'll start with you again, Judith. What did you not get the chance to say that you'd like to have said?
- [42:19]
Judith Hawley
I'm very interested in the character of Allworthy in the novel. So All Worthy. His name tells you that he is all worthy and he's the justice and he hands out justice. He judges people at the start, but he gets almost everything wrong. So he's good hearted and he's generous, but he's acting with a blindfold on or he's blinkered. And one of the things that I think Fielding is suggesting he does this. Charlotte was talking very interestingly earlier about how difficult it is to excavate people's motives. Around this time, Fielding wrote an article, an essay on the knowledge of the characters of men, which is about how you can't tell what people are thinking, that people are mostly hypocritical. Blifil, in particular, a character in the novel is a total hypocrite. And so he's really interesting about how all Worthy is good and generous, but only God can judge because he's the only one who's all seeing as well as all worthy.
- [43:16]
Henry Power
I don't quite get the bad side of him, though.
- [43:18]
Judith Hawley
You said so he makes mistakes. So he's the one who.
- [43:21]
Henry Power
But he's not bad to make mistakes.
- [43:24]
Judith Hawley
No, I think Fielding isn't judging him. I think he's saying it's inevitable that you will make mistakes because people are unknowable, especially if they're putting up a false front. And hypocrisy and masquerade, those are two of Fielding's big concerns throughout his life.
- [43:38]
Henry Power
It's interesting that you want to say more about the. The man who sort of opens the book, really, and causes it to end. Really?
- [43:46]
Judith Hawley
Yes. Yeah, yeah. He's the sort of framing figure. He's part of that sort of wonderful construction. And Allworthy, over the course of the book, has learnt who are the good people and the bad people. And he apologizes at the end, doesn't he?
- [43:58]
Charlotte Roberts
Yeah. He's also the subject of some amazing misdirection from Fielding because when we're first introduced to All Worthy. In fact, when the novel opens, the first line of the narrative proper is something like, there once lived in Somersetshire, and perhaps lives still, this gentleman called Allworthy. So the kind of is he alive or not? Is a thing that we're set up for from the start. And then there's a. You know, there's this pivotal moment towards the end of the first third. This is the moment that results in Tom being expelled from the estate when Allworthy, as the chapter title has it, appears on a sickbed. And so we are. This is just one example of hundreds of a moment where Fielding sends us down a rabbit hole, because presumably it's natural for readers to look back at that point and think, ah, perhaps lives still. Alas.
- [44:53]
Henry Power
I wonder whether thinking on this question of kind of judgment in the text and how difficult it is to exercise judgment, whether thinking about comedy and laughter as a sort of alternative to judgment within the text is something. Something that might be relevant. I sometimes feel that Fielding creates moments of humor and laughter, not in the way that a kind of harsher satirist would, as a kind of tool of judgment and a tool of criticism, but as a kind of recuperative alternative to judgment. Characters that we laugh at often kind of get forgiven and brought back within the fold within this text, and it's characters that we can't really laugh at, like Blifil, who are the absolute sort of reprobates who can't really be accommodated within this comic universe that Fielding is creating. So the very kind of genre and form of the text is giving us different ways in which we can think accurately about people's faults and flaws, but not necessarily judge them too harshly.
- [45:53]
Judith Hawley
But at the same time, and this is another thing we haven't really touched on, is that Fielding is himself a judge. You know, he becomes magistrate of Westminster and of Middlesex, who's basically the law in London, and sets up the Bow street runners with his half brother, John Fielding. And he also wrote, shortly after Tom Jones, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, in which one of the causes of the late increase of robbers is people running around the countryside all the time, leaving home and going red like Tom Jones. So it's almost as if he reserves a certain aspect of his intellectual and moral life for the fiction, is perhaps more tolerant in his fiction than he is in his professional career.
- [46:39]
Charlotte Roberts
Yeah, and something we haven't spoken about at all is how deeply suffused the book is with legal language all the time. I mean, Both, because there are lots of trials, all worthy as a magistrate. And this is what you were talking about, Judith. But he holds three trials over the course of that first section of the book and expels three people from his estate. All of them are innocent. So this is Jenny Jones and then Partridge and then Tom himself. But it's not just that you have these various trials, it's that the reader is constantly being asked to weigh evidence, to think about whether mitigation is appropriate. Characters cross examine each other. Words like litigation get used to describe discussions, because between people, the language that Fielding has picked up as a barrister is everywhere in the novel.
- [47:27]
Henry Power
There's a word that hasn't been used in this conversation. Perhaps I'll say this, but it won't be used. But there's accusations of incest. What's that all about, Judith?
- [47:38]
Judith Hawley
Well, so the accusation is that he commits incest with his sister Ursula, and as I say, it can't be known either way. But it's really striking that incest isn't a very common topic in 18th century fiction. But the only other novelist I can think of who writes about it is his sister, Sarah Fielding. So Sarah Fielding wrote a novel at around the same time as Tom Jones called David simple. And there's an incest threat in that. There's an incest threat in Joseph Andrews, there's the mother son incest threat in Tom Jones, and in each case, it's a threat or it's a revelation because people's identity is unknown. And then, phew, thank goodness. You might have slept with this person, or you might be in love with this person, but it didn't really happen. So it's almost as if that. I don't want to be too psychoanalytical about Fielding, especially as he's really resistant to that kind of interiority. But it does seem as if there's this really damaging incident in his childhood that he and his sister are dwelling on quite a lot.
- [48:38]
Charlotte Roberts
I'm just thinking about. So it's not an incest, right. There's actual incest, isn't there, in Moll Flanders? Yes.
- [48:43]
Judith Hawley
Oh, yes, that's right, yeah.
- [48:47]
Charlotte Roberts
I can't remember whether we actually talked in the program about the fact that Tom doesn't quite sleep with his mother, or rather does sleep with the person.
- [48:54]
Judith Hawley
Who turns out not to be his mother.
- [48:56]
Charlotte Roberts
Not to be his mother. But that's very heavily flagged as an Oedipal moment. So the chapter that contains that revelation is called Containing a Very Tragical Incident. You know, wink Wink. So this is. We're being pointed straight at the plot of Oedipus there. So it's being. I mean, not that I want to diminish your psychoanalytical reading, but we're being pointed and actually flagging Oedipus doesn't necessarily diminish a psychoanalytical reading, but we're being pointed straight at.
- [49:25]
Judith Hawley
But it's also very structural, isn't it? Because we're pointed at the tragedy at a moment when the reader can see that we've got another 80 pages or so left of the book. So we seem to have reached rock bottom, that Tom thinks he's slept with his mother, he's in prison, he thinks he's killed a man. You think it's all going to go horribly wrong. And the narrator steps in and says, if this were a tragedy, you know, this would be the end. But we've got another 80 pages to go.
- [49:48]
Henry Power
It's a moment of real generic play with the conventions of tragedy, because Tom and Partridge have recently gone to see a performance of Hamlet as well, in which Partridge has been sort of completely convinced. Partridge is Tom's companion on the road, the man who was thought to have been his father early on in the text and his. His kind of Sancho Panzer. Exactly, his companion. And he has sort of been convinced that the play was real. But immediately at the moment of the incest possible, incest revelation, Partridge comes to Tom in prison and he's described as looking like a spectre. And this is the man who might be his father. And it's a clear moment which parodies Hamlet's father's ghost from Hamlet. But of course, he's not the king of Denmark. He's a barber surgeon called Partridge, who's very ridiculous. And we've already had a chapter are telling us that tragedies aren't real and we shouldn't think that they're real. So there's a huge amount of generic play kind of coming out at that moment.
- [50:46]
Well, let's end on a more cheerful note. The people he influenced were very glad to influence.
- [50:52]
Judith Hawley
Let's start with Dickens. A roll call. Jane Austen.
- [50:56]
Henry Power
You start with Jane Austen. I was going to start with Dickens.
- [50:59]
Judith Hawley
Jane Austen. It is the truth universally acknowledged. I mean, that kind of narratorial voice is a development.
- [51:05]
Charlotte Roberts
The idea. Yes, exactly that. The idea that you start with this aphorism which seems sort of wise and sententious and probably true, but then it gets qualified, prodded at, and which is exactly the same as the opening of Tom Jones you know, and.
- [51:27]
Judith Hawley
Dickens.
- [51:28]
Charlotte Roberts
Yes. But the other thing that I want to say about Austen is that she is. You know, we think of Austen as being essentially a kind of, you know, psychologically realistic novelist whose great thing is that she. And it is a great thing about Austen that she's able to inhabit the consciousness of different characters and you have this consciousness, this perspective floating about. But also Austen does snap back into the consciousness of the author sometimes and reflect on the mechanics of what she's doing. So at the end of Northanger Abbey, when she says, the reader will notice from the telltale compression of the pages that we're approaching the end of this story, you kind of think that's pure Fielding.
- [52:09]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah.
- [52:09]
Judith Hawley
And Charlotte's already mentioned that playfulness and parodic sense that Fielding has. That's a good link. And Dickens, again, the authorial Persona, but also the capaciousness. Henry talked about the sort of the epic nature, which is partly a long narrative, but it's also a social survey. It's that idea to contain multitudes, and you certainly get that in Dickens.
- [52:33]
Henry Power
And he included Fielding in the naming of one of his children, didn't he?
- [52:37]
Judith Hawley
Yes, yes. Yeah. And he name checked Fielding several times. And I think in the 20th century, James Joyce is a very different kind of writer, but there's that similar kind of complex epic.
- [52:50]
Henry Power
Are we there any evidence that Joyce was influenced by Fielding at all?
- [52:53]
Judith Hawley
I don't know that. I don't know that myself.
- [52:56]
Charlotte Roberts
No people compare. So Amelia, which we. We don't want to spend too much time on Amelia because it's a very sad and angry book compared to Tom Jones. But Amelia, in a way, has as much of an afterlife as Tom Jones. It's not nearly so widely read, but it's Amelia that I think is the big influence on Dickens. This kind of quite savage social commentary mixed with bits of high comedy. And Amelia is quite close to Ulysses in character in that, whereas Tom Jones is just in quite a joyful, playful way being a version of Greek epic. And we don't dig too deep into the details, Amelia is a close reworking of Virgil's Aeneid.
- [53:37]
Henry Power
Well, thanks very much to Judith Orley, Charlotte Roberts and Henry Power. And to the studio manager, Tim Heffer.
- [53:44]
Judith Hawley
Who wants tea or coffee? Melvin?
- [53:46]
Henry Power
Tea. Okay, I'll risk a bit of tea.
- [53:53]
Judith Hawley
I think I'll go wild and have tea.
- [53:55]
Charlotte Roberts
I'd love a cup of tea. Thank you very much.
- [53:58]
Judith Hawley
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [54:06]
Melvin Bragg
This is a story about one of Britain's most revered institutions and the theft of ancient treasures that were sold around the world.
- [54:16]
Charlotte Roberts
It felt like a real punch to the stomach.
- [54:17]
Judith Hawley
My God. Things are being stolen from our museum.
- [54:20]
Melvin Bragg
I'm Katie razzle, and from BBC Radio 4, this is thief at the British Museum. At the heart of our tale is an antiquities dealer turned amateur detective thrown into the center of a global scandal.
- [54:37]
Judith Hawley
I was shocked.
- [54:38]
Henry Power
I remember that thinking my hair stood on end.
- [54:42]
Melvin Bragg
Search for shadow world Thief at the British Museum on BBC Sounds.