Fielding's Tom Jones

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Hello, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding is one of the most influential of the early English novels, a favourite of Dickens and Coleridge, and a page turner, both when it came out in seventeen forty nine 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 wreckish 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, I 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?

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, there were gentlemen 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 Velazquez depicts in his portraits of the Spanish royal family.

He was sent to Eton where he met people like George Lyttelton 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 a real ne'er-do-well.

He was a gambler, womaniser, 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 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.

And he started to write plays.

Yes.

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?

Yes.

So his plays were very controversial in subject matter and in presentation.

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 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 in debtor's house.

A sponging house, it's a wonderful name, isn't it?

So it's a kind of like a private enterprise debtor's prison where you sponge for a bit.

Bring it back, really?

Bring it back.

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 is that work so important to him?

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 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 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 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 sparked 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, Shamela, 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 Shamela, 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.

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.

So already between the two of you, sexuality is taking

front of stage, really.

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 it.

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.

We've mentioned his plays, and he was very successful at his plays.

How is his prose developing?

After Shamela, 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, you know, he's replaying the story of Joseph in Genesis, who resists the advances of 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 in prose.

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 was 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.

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.

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 Alworthy 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, Bliffle, who is Allworthy'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.

So Tom falls in love with.

I'm talking about page 42.

Yes, that's right.

I'm going to speed up though, so don't worry at all.

Maybe three leaps will do it.

Absolutely.

I think we can get there.

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 Blyffil instead.

And in addition to that, Blyffil manipulates Allworthy using some of Tom's misdemeanours 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 Bliffel 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 Sophia?

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 Allworthy's bed all those years ago?

Who are 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.

You call it the word mystery.

Fielding called it the word history.

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 and Tom Jones as a historian who leaves things out,

particularly of conversations and the development of almost every other word in most paragraphs.

Absolutely, that kind of elaboration, that kind of poetic quality, absolutely coming through.

It's more conversational than poetical, but it can be both, can't it?

Julie, we've touched on it, but can you develop what kind of boy Tom was?

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.

He was thought by some persons to be a dreadful

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 womaniser who feels entitled to take whatever woman he can, lives a life free of moral restraint.

And Tom, in some ways, 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 Blyfil.

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 be rude not to.

It's a kind of boff de politesse.

He can't actually say no to them without being rude to them.

So

he's given

a lot of rope, a lot of yardage, and a lot of leeway because he's good-hearted.

You say only three.

Let's leave it up to him.

But this includes declaring love to one person, and then he bumps into the previous one on the way out of the door.

He goes to bed with her, and so on.

It's more complicated to imagine that.

It's more complicated.

Yes,

and Fielding doesn't let him off the hook and he punishes him severely.

He ends up in prison, and

the narrator tells us if this were a tragedy, this would be absolutely the end of it.

And so there is a way 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.

Fielding gives to Tom the quality that he's so good-natured that really, in the end, none of it's his fault, and he gets off with it.

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.

Henry, Henry Parr, the Greek epic play a part in this.

Can you tell us how?

Yes, in various ways.

To start with,

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 prosé comie epic, is the way he describes it.

So he goes to everything in?

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.

This quest for Sophia is a bit here and there, isn't it?

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 we can unravel that a bit more.

Yes, when they're on the road, Tom and Sophia, they're kind of constantly overlapping and missing each other.

On the road, as it were, looking for each other and missing each other.

Yes, exactly.

That's right.

But I think it's, you know, nonetheless, Tom is, he has

appetites which he indulges with other women.

I'm not sure that I quite agree with Judith, that it's all politesse.

I think Tom Jones is a creature of appetite as well.

Do you agree with the number three?

But this 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.

It's 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 right.

Four, if you count the epilogue, I suppose.

when we see Tom happily married.

Yes, okay, yeah.

Three out of wedlock.

Three out of wedlock.

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 Moray's hominum multorum weedit, 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 these experiences is reclaim their birthright, or at least so we hope.

The narrator is constantly present.

Dominating really.

He comes to the front of the stage every two or three pages and says, This is what's going to happen, and 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?

Yes,

a lot of readers of Tom Jones have felt that that really strong and highly characterised 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 nineteenth-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 it 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 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.

Can you give us an example of that?

Well, I think what one

kind of really good example of that is that in those opening chapters which which begin each book of the novel, where Fielding's narrator does address us 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 traveller, sometimes he talks to us as if he's our 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.

Do you find it disconcerting or obviously you find it wonderful?

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.

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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Tom Jones.

Judith, let's go back to the opening chapters and this bill of fare.

What's that all about?

So he opens the bill.

It's called the Bill of Fare.

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, you know, that like precious china, that there could be a flaw in it which spoils it, but it's still beautiful and important to hold on to.

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.

What did he carry over from his stage experience and great success

to this novel?

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.

As I understand it, he himself appeared on stage introducing scene after scene.

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 in the inn at Upton, where pretty much all of the characters come in and out, and doors open and closed.

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 dusty jokes are about.

So I think that that sense of the audience and of the structure of drama is there.

We heard, sorry, Henry, you wanted to come in.

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, it's 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 travellers 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 it.

He doesn't get the feedback he got in the theatre.

Exactly.

Yes.

Coleridge is one of the people who praised the plot as one of the three greatest in literature.

What were the other two 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 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 we, you know, 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, 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.

I mean, 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 kind of perfectly in place.

Do we have any roughs of the way he did it?

What do we have left?

Is that an original manuscript?

Sadly, that original.

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 organised, 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 that the nation is in peril.

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.

So there's a lot going on, isn't there?

What we haven't come to yet, Charlotte, is the women in the case.

Can you lead on that?

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 might say now have dated less well about Tom Jones and 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

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.

Do we have to mention Sophia's muff at this point?

Surely we do, Henry.

Surely we do.

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 symbolises their relationship.

And there are constant references to Sophia's muff.

It gets left behind in a.

Does this have a secondary meaning?

Oh, yes.

Oh yes.

Yes, it barely has a primary meaning.

It would be funny they won't mean what they mean in consequence.

I think it probably has a stronger...

The innuendo would have been stronger in 1749 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 Mrs.

Waters isn't it it's Mrs Waters exactly she gets him back by pinning her name to her muff and leaving it in his bedroom so he discovers it but that is a pretty definite gesture from from Sophia that you know that she is a sexual person who Tom Jones has what does it say she's still in the running or she's fed up with him?

I think a little bit of both, isn't it?

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 human individuals have?

So it's both about sexuality and the position of women, but also these much larger issues to do with who's in power.

Yes.

As I said very earlier, I just mentioned it, he tends to go off 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 to describe in detail Sophia as if he were doing a painting of her.

It's extraordinary.

Yeah,

he airbrushes her.

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's 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

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 Belliston and Mrs.

Waters.

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.

Her father conjoles her.

Yeah, that's right.

That's exactly right.

More than cajoling, aren't you?

Squire Weston does everything with impetuosity and that, including that.

But it's really, I think it's a moment, it's not a moment of shyness or kind of modesty on Sophia'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 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 learnt 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.

Was the novel a great success?

And if so, what effect did it have on Field and his career, Judith?

It was a great success.

It sold very well, it went into numerous printings, didn't it, Henry, in the first year?

There are four editions in the first year, and I think

10,000 copies get printed in the first year of its existence, which is a lot.

It's a significant number given the size of the readership.

Fielding's next and last significant novel, Amelia, is very, very 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 bad 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 said a tap in his stomach and drained off litres 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.

Tom Jones, it's 275 years old.

Do you think it still works for a modern audience?

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, what I mean, what's not to like?

It's both high and low.

It's read classically learned and then it's it's bawdy and funny.

Charlotte, what do you think is readable about it now?

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 hold true today.

This is a novel that tells us to stop introspecting, to stop becoming kind of

self-satisfied or self-interested and instead to look outward and to kind of look socially.

The last time I did this programme 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 Melvyn kind of living out the social dynamics of this text.

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.

Well thank you very much.

Thanks to Judith Horley 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.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I'll start with you again, Judith.

What did you not get the chance to say that you'd like to have said?

I'm very interested in the character of Allworthy in the novel.

So Allworthy is, you know, his name tells you that he is Allworthy 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, and 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 called 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.

Blyfil, in particular, a character in the novel, is a total hypocrite.

And so he's really interesting about how Allworthy is good and generous,

but only God can judge, because he's the only one who's all-seeing as well as all-worthy.

I don't quite get the bad side of him, though.

You've said.

So he makes mistakes.

So he's the one who...

He's that bad to make mistakes.

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.

It's interesting that you want to say more about the man who sort of opens the book, really, and causes it to end, really.

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 apologises at the end, doesn't he?

Yeah, he's also the subject of some amazing misdirection from Fielding, because when we're first introduced to Allworthy, 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 up for from the stars.

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 sick bed.

And so we are,

this is one of, just one example of hundreds of

a moment where Fielding sends us down a rabbit hole because presumably we, you know, it's natural for readers to look back at that point and think, ah, perhaps live still, alas.

I wonder whether

you're 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

that might be relevant.

I sometimes feel that fielding creates moments of humour 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 Blyffil, 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.

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 road, 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.

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.

Allworthy is 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 this is Jenny Jones and then Partridge and then and then Tom himself.

But it's not just that you have these these various trials it's that the reader is constantly being asked to to weigh evidence, to think about whether mitigation is appropriate.

Characters cross-examine each other, words like litigation get used to describe discussions between people.

The language that Fielding has picked up as a barrister is everywhere in the novel.

There's a word that hasn't been used in this conversation, and perhaps I'll say this, but it won't be used, but there's accusations of incest.

What's that all about Judith?

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 few, 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

that I'm just thinking about so there's there's there's it's not an incest threat there's actual incest isn't there in Mole Flanders yes oh yes that's right yeah yeah the

I can't remember whether we actually talked in the programme about the fact that Tom doesn't quite sleep with his mother, or rather does sleep with the person who turns out his mother, who turns out not to be his mother.

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 it.

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.

You know, that Tom thinks he has 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.

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 kind of his 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 where it 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 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.

Yeah.

And let's hand on a more cheerful note.

The people he influenced were very oh, yes, yeah.

He He had a great influence.

Let's start with Dickens.

A roll call.

Jane Austen.

Oh, you start with Jane Austen.

I'm going to start with Dickens.

Jane Austen.

It is a truth universally acknowledged.

I mean, that kind of narratorial voice is a development of the idea, yes, exactly.

The idea that you start with this aphorism, which seems sort of wise and sententious and probably true, but then it gets qualified.

And cross that.

Yeah, it's in one side.

Which is

exactly the same as the opening of Tom Jones um you know uh

and uh

Dickens yes but the other thing about that I want to say about Austin is that she is you know we think of Austin as being essentially a kind of you know psychologically realistic novelist whose great thing is that she and it is a great thing about Austin that that she's able to inhabit the consciousness of different characters and you have this consciousness this this perspective floating about.

But also Austin 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 that's pure Fielding.

Yeah, 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 the capaciousness.

Henry talked about the sort of sort of the epic nature, which is partly a long narrative, but it's also a social survey, is that idea to contain multitudes, and you certainly get that in Dickens.

And he included Fielding in the naming of one of his children.

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.

I mean, only Evans and Joyce was influenced by Fielding at all.

I don't know that.

I don't know that myself.

No, people compare.

So, Amelia, which 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, you know, 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.

Well, thanks very much to Judith Ollie, Charlotte Roberts, and Henry Power, and to studio manager Tim Heffer.

Who wants your coffee?

Love him, tea?

Okay, I'll risk a bit of tea.

Risk some tea.

Anybody else?

I think I'll go wild and have tea as well.

I'd love a cup of tea.

Thanks, everybody.

In our time with Melvin Bragg, it's produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

This is a story about one of Britain's most revered institutions

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I'm Katie Razzle, and from BBC Radio 4, this is Thief at the British Museum.

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