Henry Fielding is the first of our novelists to come from the gentry. His father Edmund Fielding was a general in the British army related by blood to the earls of Denbigh and Desmond; his mother Sarah Gould was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a landowner in Somersetshire in the West Country. Fielding was born in 1709 and spent his youth at Sharpham Park near Glastonbury, the estate of his maternal grandparents. He had a traditional education in Greek and Latin literature at Eton College, where his friends included George Lyttelton (later his patron, to whom Tom Jones is dedicated) and William Pitt, later prime minister of England. It was at Eton, too, that Fielding acquired the habit of good living, at or beyond his means. In his late teens, following a romantic debacle – he had attempted to elope with Sarah Andrew, an heiress of Lyme Regis – he registered at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands, where he read literature and law while running up debts he would never repay. He left without a degree and, after a brief tour of the continent, returned to London where, with some help from his literary cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he placed his first comedy, Love in Several Masques (1728) at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
For the next nine years, Fielding was a working dramatist living in London; he wrote 26 plays, primarily social comedies and political satires, of which the most successful, and the best‐known today, was the farcical Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731). Fielding’s career as a comic playwright came to an abrupt end when his political farce, The Historical Register for the Year 1736, provoked its principal target, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, to pass the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which required all plays to be approved by a government censor, the Lord Chamberlain, before being performed in public – a form of censorship that was not repealed until 1968.
In 1730 Fielding had met Charlotte Cradock, who was to be his muse and the model for two of his heroines, Sophia Western and Amelia Booth. Four years later, his career as a dramatist then flourishing, Fielding and Charlotte, by then the sole heiress to her mother’s estate, were married at a village church north of Bath, where Charlotte was caring for her mother during her last illness. But in the fall of 1737, with his dramatic career in ruins and a wife and an infant daughter to support, Fielding began studying law at the Middle Temple, and made such rapid progress that he was called to the bar in June 1740. While studying, Fielding defrayed some of his family’s mounting debts by editing and writing editorials for an Opposition journal to the Walpole government titled The Champion (1739–41). Nevertheless, Fielding was arrested for debt in February 1741 and confined in a spunging house – a halfway house for debtors’ prison – until he found friends to bail him out.
Perhaps it was during this confinement that he found time to read Richardson’s Pamela and to write his brilliant parody Shamela, published in April 1741. He continued for the rest of his life to combine his literary work with a career in the law, first as a barrister and later as a judge. After following the Western Circuit as a barrister in the summer of 1741, Fielding was entertained and perhaps helped out with money by the generous philanthropist Ralph Allen, who had just moved into his stately home, Prior Park, in the woods south of Bath; Allen is alluded to in Joseph Andrews1 and became the model for Mr. Allworthy in Tom Jones.
On his return to London, Fielding finished Joseph Andrews, selling the copy to the Scottish publisher Andrew Millar for what was then the princely sum of £200. In 1743 Fielding published three miscellaneous volumes, including Jonathan Wild, a fictional narrative written years earlier about an actual criminal (executed in 1725) who operated on both sides of the law, supplying testimony to hang thieves but also fencing their stolen goods and collecting rewards for the return of stolen property. Fielding’s satirical point was that what Wild had been to organized crime, Sir Robert Walpole was to organized politics of the Whig government.2 But Walpole had stepped down as prime minister in 1742 and Fielding had to publish his novel before the object of his satire faded in public memory.
In 1744, after a long illness, probably tuberculosis, Charlotte Fielding died. Fielding became wild with grief, friends wondered whether he may have become suicidal; certainly his own once robust health began to deteriorate at this point. In 1745 Fielding started writing Tom Jones, but its progress was slowed by Fielding’s response to the Jacobite rebellion led that summer by Bonnie Prince Charlie. During the rebellion Fielding wrote pro‐Hanoverian propaganda for the new government (which included his old friend George Lyttelton) in a journal, The True Patriot, followed by The Jacobite’s Journal. In 1747 Fielding married Mary Daniel, his housekeeper and his late wife’s former maid – a surprising and ironic event in the life of the man who had ridiculed in Shamela the misalliance of a gentleman and a chambermaid; from the records it appears she was pregnant at the time of their marriage, and Fielding sired by her three children in all.
In 1748 he finished Tom Jones and sold the copyright to Millar for £600. For his services to the government, Fielding was appointed to the London judiciary, with jurisdiction extended in 1749 to all of Middlesex county. For the rest of Fielding’s legal career, he held court in Bow Street near Covent Garden, inventing expedients to make the streets of London safe; he pioneered a detective force, the Bow Street Runners, to infiltrate gangs: they are the predecessors of what is now Scotland Yard. This work was continued after Henry’s death by his half‐brother John Fielding, who was honored with a knighthood. In 1749 Tom Jones was published: it went through four editions totaling 10,000 copies within a year. But by now Fielding’s health – he suffered from gout and from congestive heart failure – was in serious decline. His much anticipated last novel, Amelia, was published in 1751, but its sales were disappointing compared with its predecessor. In 1754 Fielding was advised to travel for his health to warmer climes; he went to Lisbon, writing a journal during his voyage and after his arrival, but he died soon after landing and is buried there in the English cemetery.
Like Shamela, discussed in Chapter 4, Joseph Andrews begins as another spoof on Pamela: the footman Joseph, named for his chaste biblical counterpart, is forced to defend his virtue against the sexual predation of his employer Lady Booby, just as his sister Pamela did against Mr. B. Fielding provokes a few easy laughs at Joseph, who pretends he does not realize what his mistress wants of him; though Fielding’s moral point goes deeper than just saying no:
Once Joseph has been turned away from Lady Booby’s town house in London and joins Parson Abraham Adams on the road to Booby Hall, Joseph Andrews, as the title page promises, turns into a free adaptation of Don Quixote.3 The Quixote figure is Adams, whose Christian idealism makes him inevitably misunderstand the intentions and moral character of the various innkeepers, squires, and clergymen they meet along their way, while Joseph is, like Sancho Panza, more realistic and discerning. Fielding imitates the Quixote in another respect: like Cervantes, he breaks up the primary narrative with brief narrative digressions tonally different from the main narrative. (One of these digressions, “The History of Leonora, or The Unfortunate Jilt” was written, in whole or part, by Fielding’s sister Sarah.)
But unlike the Quixote, which is entirely episodic in structure, and simply ends rather than concluding, Fielding’s comedy is goal‐oriented, like Pamela. By the eleventh chapter the reader is aware that the plot’s target is the marriage between Joseph and his sweetheart, Fanny Goodwill, which can take place only if all the obstacles to their happiness are eliminated. By using a self‐conscious third‐person narrator, Fielding is able to create with greater ease and sureness than Richardson the authorial plane of expectations and of values by which we judge the various characters whom we meet in the course of the narrative. Fielding’s skill as a dramatist is needed to create the narrative plane, by which we react to the characters as representative of human types whom we know from our own experience. But unlike Richardson, whose principal characters are created from within, Fielding’s acquire their sense of life through their vivid interactions with one another, while the narrator creates a connection with the reader in the world they share:
The opening clause, with its classical reference to Aurora as the goddess of dawn, reminds us of Fielding’s Preface, which had promised a narrative like Homer’s, but a comic epic in prose, and situates us in the real world of 1742, with its satirical slap at the current poet laureate of England, Colley Cibber, and his incompetent odes written for each royal birthday. The second rapidly returns us to the fiction, in which Joseph, robbed and stripped naked by highwaymen, has been carried to the Tow‐wouse inn. And what follows, the vivid and racy – not to say vulgar – dialogue between the wife and the chambermaid, and the wife and her husband, suggests the mixture of Christian charity and smug self‐interest that we will find in Fielding’s fictional world. The fortunate end of this brief dispute – the wife gets her way but Joseph nevertheless gets the shirt he needs – functions to help set up the comic expectations through which we will continue to read the adventures of Fielding’s hero.
In Tom Jones, Fielding doubled down on the narrative techniques he had developed in Joseph Andrews to create what he announces in the first chapter of Book II as “a new Province of Writing” and which is universally esteemed as his masterpiece. Epic in length, Tom Jones runs to 350,000 words (roughly three times the length of Joseph Andrews, but less than half of Clarissa) divided into eighteen books. Geographically, the novel parallels Joseph Andrews but moves in the opposite direction, from country to town, and now with a symmetrical pattern: The first six books are set in a rural neighborhood in Somersetshire, at the seats of Squire Allworthy and Squire Western, the middle six are set on the road to London (during the specific summer of 1745 that saw the recent Jacobite Rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie), and the concluding six books are set in London, where the action of Joseph Andrews had begun.
The sagacious, self‐conscious narrator of Tom Jones not only characterizes his fictional world from a position outside it, as before, but chattily addresses us, admonishing or cajoling by turns, writes a brief essay as the first chapter of each book, usually pointed toward our sense of the characters or the action, or the ethical ideas or fictional techniques Fielding is wielding. In fact the narrator represents himself as having formed an acquaintance with his readers over the long journey, from whom he takes a fond farewell at the beginning of the final book. He becomes a vivid character in the text – the most important character, Wayne Booth has argued – although he always subordinates himself to his story, a relationship that will be tested, a decade or so later, by Laurence Sterne. Fielding’s narrator is outside the fictional world in the sense that, unlike Behn’s narrator in Oroonoko, there is no direct interaction between narrator and hero. Nevertheless, although the characters are fictional, including some with characteristic names like Allworthy and Thwackum that might have come out of an allegory by Bunyan, the lifeworlds of the characters and Fielding’s contemporary readers intersect: Tom and Sophia Western, the heroine, tread the country roads and London streets that Fielding’s readers knew. Sophia is in Book XI mistaken for Jenny Cameron, the Pretender’s mistress, and describing fisticuffs between Tom Jones and Nightingale’s footman in Book XIII, Fielding twice references John Broughton, a celebrated prizefighter and martial arts teacher of his day.
References to contemporary people and events abound even in the sections of the narrative set in the fictional estates in Somersetshire. (According to one account, Fielding told London acquaintances that his new novel would feature references to all his friends, and rushed to the printer to add to Book X an allusion to Amey Hussey the mantua‐maker, in order to make good on this promise.) All this adds to the reality‐effect of Fielding’s narrative, in a method taken up by most later novelists and still used today, and very different from that of explicit claims, such as Defoe made in Moll Flanders or Richardson in Pamela and Clarissa, of the author’s merely being the editor of a memoir or letters by real people.
Tom Jones also marks a major advance in the way Fielding develops his characters. While most of the major agents in the story are flat characters who never change, and others (like Roger Thwackum the bigoted birch‐wielding tutor) are merely what Sheldon Sacks termed “walking concepts,” Fielding’s hero is a complex character with both admirable traits and major flaws of character that destroy, at least temporarily, his relationships with those he holds most dear. As Allworthy says to Tom in Book V, “ I am convinced, my Child, that you have much Goodness, Generosity, and Honour, in your Temper: if you will add Prudence and Religion to these, you must be happy; for the three former Qualities, I admit, make you worthy of Happiness, but they are the latter only which will put you in Possession of it.” We see his hero grow from a child to manhood, and Tom grows up benevolent and good‐natured, preferring others’ happiness to his own, but he is also too quick with his fists and too susceptible to amorous women. (He is, however, always the seduced, never the seducer, the opposite of Richardson’s predatory males.)
His imprudence in both respects becomes his undoing: during the last third of the novel, he comes to understand that, though he has been plotted against by ill‐wishers, his obliviousness to the possible consequences of his actions has made him his own worst enemy. Fielding presents him as credibly resolving to change and as taking the first steps toward eradicating those faults. Neither Tom nor his other vivid characters indulge in the elaborate self‐analysis that we find in Pamela or even in Moll Flanders. As a former playwright, Fielding presents the moral complexities of his characters as they appear from the outside, rather than in terms of struggles within; in fact we are given what might almost be stage directions for an actor, with phrases like “a little ruffled,” “a little frightened,” to indicate the inner state of those whose words we read, and Fielding also created foils for his major characters (Partridge for Tom, her maid Honour for Sophia) to allow their thoughts to emerge naturally in dialogue. Later novelists like Jane Austen would find new techniques that manage to combine the interior views of Richardson and the exterior views of Fielding.
Like its hero, the plot of Tom Jones is complex and intricate, with nearly two dozen major characters who appear in more than one episode, and an even larger supporting cast; and presenting all its twists and turns is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, as we can see on viewing the action in retrospect, all the plot strands originate from Bridget Allworthy’s plan to safeguard her reputation by placing her own illegitimate son as a foundling in her brother Thomas Allworthy’s bed, and by paying Jenny Jones, an intelligent servant, to take the blame as the child’s mother, with the intent of eventually informing her brother of the truth. After Bridget marries and produces a legitimate son, Blifil, she delays her confession until she is on her deathbed, and the letter she then writes to her brother is intercepted by Blifil, so that we and Allworthy learn of Tom’s parentage only in the very last chapters of the novel. This produces a tension rather than an instability – the reader understands throughout the novel that there is a mystery about Tom’s parentage. Jenny’s confession hints at this, Partridge denies the paternity that others lay at his door, and pretty much everyone in the novel, rich or poor, assume upon meeting him that Tom is a gentleman born until they learn the official version of his origins.
For the novel to have closure, this mystery will have to be cleared up, but the primary effect of Tom’s putative origin as Jenny’s son by Partridge is to give him what becomes an unstable position in the Allworthy household as an adopted “son” who is also a mere foundling who can be repudiated if his behavior seems to warrant it. His legitimate half‐brother Blifil, a conniving hypocrite, becomes his rival for the love of the two people about whom Tom cares most, his “father” Allworthy and his sweetheart, Sophia Western, daughter and heir of a neighboring squire. Earlier attempts to blacken Tom’s character backfire, but at a crucial point in the narrative, Blifil, aided by the tutors Thwackum and Square, successfully misrepresent Tom’s behavior so as to convince Allworthy to expel Tom from his home. Meanwhile, Sophia, whose father and aunt are insistent that she marry the odious Blifil, escapes to seek refuge with her cousin Lady Bellaston in London. The escape and the expulsion initiate the middle section of the plot, in which Tom plans first to go to sea, then to take up arms against the Pretender, and finally – after discovering that Sophia has left Somersetshire for the road to London – to follow her to the metropolis, where the final action of the novel takes place.
In London, Tom displays his mixed character as before: he exerts himself in benevolent and honorable activities that save the lives of the brother and the daughter of Mrs. Miller (in whose house Allworthy stays when in London); but he also becomes Lady Bellaston’s kept man, which R.S. Crane calls Tom’s “closest approach … to a base act”4 (628). After seeing Sophia again, Tom extracts himself from this tawdry relationship by proposing marriage, which is effective but ill‐advised. Tom foresees that Lady Bellaston would never marry him, but he does not foresee that his letter of proposal has given her a ready‐made weapon to use against him with Sophia, who on reading it breaks with Tom completely. Meanwhile Mr. Fitzpatrick, a jealous husband, mistakes Tom for his wife’s lover and attacks him in the street, where Tom, aggressively defending himself, apparently wounds him seriously. Tom is taken to Newgate Prison, perhaps to be tried for his life, and it is in a cell that he reads Sophia’s letter of dismissal.
His imprudence, aggressive and sexual, have led him to this low point, and it is here at Newgate that, like Moll Flanders, Tom resolves to change his ways. Fitzpatrick soon recovers and admits he started the fight, and the guiltless Tom is released. Meanwhile the Westerns, Allworthy and Blifil arrive in London, along with Jenny Jones, Partridge, and Bridget’s solicitor, Lawyer Dowling. As Crane puts it: “All those … who know Bridget’s secret – and Blifil’s villainy in suppressing it at the time of her death – are now assembled, for the first time, in close proximity to Allworthy.” The denouement comes with great rapidity: Allworthy disinherits Blifil and restores Tom to his position as his adopted son. With Tom now Allworthy’s heir,5 Squire Western is now enthusiastic about his marrying Sophia. And Sophia – who has forgiven Tom for his illicit relations with other women in the past – agrees, with a show of reluctance that is partly mere show, to become his wife.
Plots that turn on the revelation of secrets, like mystery stories, notoriously lose their power on second reading; but Fielding has built enough irony into his complex structure to compensate for what we lose in suspense. For example, when Tom gets drunk after he learns of Allworthy’s recovery from his illness, he is reproached by Blifil, who is in mourning for his mother’s recent death. Tom immediately apologizes, but instead of accepting, “Blifil scornfully rejected his Hand; and, with much Indignation answered, ‘It was little to be wondered at if tragical Spectacles made no Impressions on the Blind; but, for his Part, he had the Misfortune to know who his Parents were, and consequently must be affected by their Loss.’” There follows a scuffle, and, in the next chapter, a full‐scale fist‐fight between Jones and Blifil, aided by Thwackum, which, reported to Allworthy, causes Tom’s expulsion from his home. But what we see only on a second reading of the novel is that from his perspective, Blifil’s provocative words refer to the fact that, having intercepted his late mother’s letter and learned the secret of Tom’s birth, he knows as Tom does not that Tom is his elder brother and is bereaved exactly as he is. (Similarly, on a second reading we will understand, when Lawyer Dowling first meets Tom at a roadside inn in Book XII and speaks of “your Uncle Allworthy,” that he is not talking loosely but assumes that Tom knows his precise relationship to his foster father.)
Unlike Richardson’s Pamela, whose narrative begins precisely where the plot instability does, or Clarissa, where the narrative begins with the plot already under way, Fielding opted for an unusual quantity of exposition prior to the launch of the plot, which takes place in Book VI, nearly a third of the way into the novel. Tom is introduced as a newborn infant in the second chapter, but two books are taken up with the search for Tom’s putative parents, Jenny Jones and Partridge, who reappear in different guises later in the novel, in ways Fielding needs for his brilliant denouement. These two books also contain the courtship of Bridget Allworthy, Tom’s actual mother, by Captain John Blifil, who marries Bridget and becomes the father of Tom’s rival and half‐brother. Part of what Fielding accomplishes in this segment of the opening has to do with managing the reader’s expectations: Captain Blifil plans to succeed Squire Allworthy as the greatest landowner in Somerset, but dies unexpectedly of an apoplexy while greedily calculating his brother‐in‐law’s wealth. This episode foreshadows the younger Blifil’s plot against Tom and its outcome, which backfires badly on him. Two more books present episodes from Tom’s youth, in which generosity and good nature combined with imprudence lead him into trouble again and again; but each time he is reconciled with Allworthy with warmer feelings than before. As with Pamela, the reader comes to assume that since nothing irrevocable has happened, nothing will, and we carry those expectations into the plot launch in which Tom is ejected from Allworthy’s estate with nothing but the clothes on his back.
There are, of course, other elements in the plot that generate comic expectations other than the pattern that has been set up during the launch. As R.S. Crane puts it, Tom’s antagonists are not powerful villains but rather “persons for whom … we are bound to feel a certain contempt” (634). Blifil is a sniveling tattle‐tale, and is also obliquely characterized as what would be called in British slang a wanker: “The Charms of Sophia had not made the least Impression on Blifil; not that his Heart was pre‐engaged; neither was he totally insensible of Beauty, or had any Aversion to Women; but his Appetites were by Nature so moderate, that he was able, by Philosophy, or by Study, or by some other Method, easily to subdue them.”6
The delayed launch also directs our values: we are constantly presented with the difference between those who speak the language of religion and virtue, like the tutors Thwackum and Square, and the hypocritical villain Blifil, and those who actually practice benevolence and the love of one’s neighbor (Fielding calls it simply “goodness”), like Allworthy, Tom, and Sophia. This distinction appears as early as our first sighting of Tom in Squire Allworthy’s bed in Book I, chapter iii. Fielding’s narrator focalizes the scene first through Allworthy, whom he presents as attentive to his public duties,7 his private duty (to his sister), and even his duty to God, since despite extreme fatigue, he spends “some minutes” in prayer, before finding the “little Wretch” in his bed, who inspires in him “Sentiments of Compassion.” Indeed, Allworthy is so rapt in contemplating the innocence of the baby that he is oblivious that he is wearing nothing but his shirt.8 As he calls for his housekeeper to take care of the child, Fielding suddenly shifts the focalization to Deborah Wilkins, emphasizing first her personal vanity (spending “many Minutes” doing her hair), in which she indulges despite the possible emergency, and then her prudish shock at finding Mr. Allworthy dressed for bed. The narrator then backs away asking us to contemplate the contradiction between her primping – to make oneself sexually attractive – and her priggishness. Characteristically, the narrator gives the reader two equally unsatisfactory alternatives: we certainly don’t want to be one of those “Sneerers and prophane Wits” who just laugh at the housekeeper, but we also don’t want to be “my graver Reader” who “will highly justify and applaud” her “most terrible Fright” – at seeing “a Man without his Coat.” (The “graver Reader” may be the ideal reader of Richardson, for whom predatory males are stock characters.) The narrator finally ironizes the situation by providing a third alternative: “unless the Prudence which must be supposed to attend Maidens at that Period of Life at which Mrs Deborah had arrived, should a little lessen his Admiration.” Only then do we hear her response to the foundling:
It is hard to know which is worse, Deb Wilkins’s defining “taking proper care” of the infant as leaving it in a basket out of doors on a rainy and windy night, or her invoking the Christian idea of dying in a state of grace as justification. And this scene prepares us for the frequent combination of hypocrisy and inhumanity that we find throughout the novel, and that is the primary threat to Tom Jones. Deb Wilkins’s principal hypocrisy – her primping prudery – has a sexual tinge, and that may have been chosen because the primary fault that threatens to overbalance our hero’s virtues is sexual incontinence. By satirizing Deb Wilkins’s misplaced prudery, including her savage indignation about the infant’s mother, the reader is being asked to lower the position of chastity and raise the position of active benevolence in the hierarchy of moral values.
The delayed launch also allows Fielding to mold our expectations as well as our values. In Book IV, chapter iv, for example, around the table of Squire Western, various characters discuss the behavior of Blifil in freeing a singing bird that Tom had trained and given to the squire’s daughter Sophia. After Thwackum the clergyman and Square the philosopher have justified Blifil’s spiteful and mean‐spirited action (as Christian and as according to the Rule of Right, respectively), Western turns to his lawyer:
This brief vignette tells us all we need to know about the law as it will function in Tom Jones: lawyers are free with Latin terms of art that nobody but they understand, but the law has nothing much to do with equity or justice. When Tom is imprisoned for injuring Fitzpatrick in a fight that Fitzpatrick provoked, we are not to expect that Tom’s actual innocence will be of any interest to the legal system any more than Sophia Western’s actual ownership of the singing bird had been. And we know that Lawyer Dowling – one of the few who know the secret of Tom’s birth – will not clarify matters until he perceives that it is no longer in his interest to keep the secret. (At the end of the novel, when justice is being handed out, Black George’s finding and keeping for himself Jones’s bank bills for £500 is discovered – along with the fact that, owing to a legal technicality, he cannot be prosecuted.)
Fielding similarly manipulates our sense of the medical profession and its prognoses. Allworthy makes his will in Book V, because his physician – in order to take the more credit for curing his fever – has suggested that his recovery would be a miracle. After he has told his household of his bequests, however, the narrator informs us that “Mr Allworthy’s Situation had never been so bad as the great Caution of the Doctor had represented it,” and that indeed he has already recovered. This is useful knowledge, for when Ensign Northerton throws a bottle at Tom’s head in Book VII, chapter xii, and the surgeon who examines him gives Tom a dire prognosis, we are not surprised that, at the beginning of chapter xiv, Tom is up and around and eating like a starved adolescent. And given this pattern, as soon as we are told in Book XVI, about the injured Mr. Fitzpatrick, that he is “at a Tavern under the Surgeon’s Hands …, that the Wound was certainly mortal, and there were no Hopes of Life,” we can expect, as in the previous cases, that Fitzpatrick is bound to recover very quickly, as indeed he does.
Like Don Quixote and like Fielding’s earlier Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones includes digressions, semi‐independent narratives told to one of the main characters, whose relation to the main action can be puzzling. The three lengthiest digressions, all located in the relatively picaresque “road to London” sequence of Books VII–XII, are The Man of the Hill’s story, told to Tom and Partridge, which takes up much of Book VIII, Mrs. Fitzppatrick’s story, told to Sophia, which takes up much of Book XI, and the episode of the Gypsies, which makes up Book XII, chapter xii. The episode of the Gypsies is perhaps the most puzzling of the three: the best guess is that it is an apologue arguing that public shame might be the most effective punishment for rooting out anti‐social behavior, a topic that probably interested Fielding the judge more than Fielding the novelist.
The other two digressions bear on the main action in interesting ways. The Man of the Hill, whom Tom saves from some ruffians, seems to be a debased version of Tom Jones himself. When Tom calls himself “the most unhappy of Mankind” the Man of the Hill asks, “Perhaps you have had a Friend, or a Mistress?” Tom is indeed suffering from separation from Allworthy and from Sophia, and we expect to hear a story similar to Tom’s. But the story of the Man of the Hill is very different: his Sophia was a common prostitute who encouraged him to steal money from a wealthy friend to support her pleasures; his Allworthy was a card‐sharper who betrayed him to the authorities after his involvement in the 1685 rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth. The Man of the Hill explains he has withdrawn from humankind because of his experience of treachery, which leave him wondering why a benevolent God would have created “so foolish and so vile an Animal” as man. But he does not convince Tom to renounce the active quality Fielding calls “goodness” and become, like him, a hermit. Indeed, our last view of the Man of the Hill contrasts him and Tom: he is waiting “with great Patience and Unconcern” (with his gun in hand) while Tom rushes into trouble with only his walking‐stick to save Mrs. Waters from the brutality of Ensign Northerton. Harriet Fitzpatrick’s story begins by implicitly suggesting similarity between her lot and that of her cousin Sophia: both fell in love with a man and eloped in order to marry him. But the subsequent adventures of Harriet – her imprisonment by her persistently unfaithful husband and her escape with the help of her own lover, an Irish peer – make clear to Sophia that “her cousin was not better than she should be,” and Sophia departs her company as quickly as she politely can. In both cases the reader is treated to a story in which our attention is split between the tale itself, a variation on our central plot, and what the tale tells us about the hero and heroine, about their responses as readers of others.
A much shorter digression, which begins and ends in three paragraphs, has a very different relation to the principal narrative. This is the story told by Broadbrim the Quaker, whom Tom meets at an inn in Book VII, chapter x:
Here the relation between the main story and the digression is perfectly clear: Broadbrim is in the same situation as Squire Western, with a daughter he had intended to marry to a man of his choosing, who has been frustrated by her elopement. Like Broadbrim, Western has, not long ago, told Sophia: “I am resolved upon the Match, and unless you consent to it I will not give you a Groat, not a single Farthing; no, though I saw you expiring with Famine in the Street, I would not relieve you with a Morsel of Bread.” The primary difference, apart from the Quaker’s lower rank in society, is that while Tom and Sophia have the good fortune to be the hero and heroine of Fielding’s comedy, which will end with their happy marriage, the Quaker’s daughter and son‐in‐law, for all we know, live miserably ever after. The lifeworld of Tom Jones is one in which Providence does not shine on everyone, and this gives moral seriousness to Fielding’s comedy.
Tom Jones is a novel whose complex plot depends at many turns on coincidence. Blifil’s plot against Tom requires that Bridget’s deathbed letter arrive while Allworthy is ill with fever, while its exposure depends on the chance meetings of Allworthy with Jenny Jones/Mrs. Waters, Partridge, and Dowling in London. Fielding does not hide these coincidences as other novelists (like Jane Austen) often do: in fact he flaunts these clockwork plot devices, the narrator ironically telling the reader that bringing his “Favourites” from misery to happiness seems “a Task so hard that we do not undertake to execute it,” and urging readers with a taste for public hangings to take “a first Row at Tyburn” for the final scene of “poor Jones.” The question is what we are to make of them. Are we to see them as the result of Fortune, of pure random chance, or of the workings of divine Providence? (A third alternative would be some form of Cosmic Injustice, but given the distribution of punishments and rewards according to the characters’ deserts in Tom Jones, we are clearly not in a lifeworld like that of Thomas Hardy, in which a malignant fate seems to pursue all who aspire to happiness.)9 R.S. Crane in “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones” took up the first alternative, which Ralph Rader attempted to refute in “Tom Jones: The Form in History.”10
Crane argues that Tom has had a “hairbreadth escape” in a serious world in which most people are selfish and some actively malicious; “we realize … that [Tom] has, in truth, needed all the good luck that has been his.” This is not a merely amiable comedy: “Though the pleasure remains consistently comic, … [w]e are not disposed to feel, when we are done laughing at Tom, that all is right with the world or that we can count on Fortune always intervening, in the same gratifying way, on behalf of the good” (638).
Rader, for his part, argued quite cogently that Fielding believed in a version of the Anglican faith known as Latitudinarianism, which argued the complementary nature of faith and good works, and that God’s reward for his faithful servants would arrive, though through secondary causes. And Rader quotes Isaac Barrow, the Latitudinarian divine, to the effect that:
The concatenation of coincidences that bring about the happy denouement of Tom Jones, Rader argues, are beyond what mere “fortune” can accomplish and must be ascribed to divine Providence.
While I agree with Rader that Fielding probably held a personal belief in Providence, and while it is true that several of Fielding’s characters (including both Tom and Allworthy) ascribe coincidences to divine will rather than mere chance, I feel that Crane is closer to the truth about Fielding’s narrative. First, the complex and rich economy of Fielding’s novel allows us to become acquainted with a series of episodes like that of Broadbrim’s daughter, presenting us with people who will suffer or have suffered a harsh fate through no fault of their own.12 Second, the word “Providence” is spoken by characters but never by Fielding’s narrator, who consistently ascribes coincidences to “Fortune.”13 Third, Fielding’s meta‐discussion of coincidence within the novel explicitly rejects the Providential view. In Book XII, for example, the narrator says that:
The “wise and good” reader believes in divine punishment for wickedness – negative Providence, if you will; the “silly and bad” reader believes that our reputations are at the mercy of mere chance. Fielding’s “great, useful, and uncommon Doctrine” is the one implicit in what Allworthy says to Tom in Book V: “I am convinced … that you have much Goodness, Generosity, and Honour, in your Temper: if you will add Prudence and Religion to these, you must be happy; for the three former Qualities, I admit, make you worthy of Happiness, but they are the latter only which will put you in Possession of it.” Prudence here is the key: it does not make us worthy of happiness, but it decreases the degree to which our happiness depends on mere chance. Fielding’s narrator, in the opening chapter of Book XV, explicitly argues against the Providential view “that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.” Indeed, Fielding argues that this view is not only fallacious but “is destructive of one of the noblest Arguments that Reason alone can furnish for the Belief in Immortality.”14
The reason why both Crane and Rader may both seem to be right is that Fielding, the divine master builder of his lifeworld in Tom Jones, has designed matters so that all works out by chance precisely as a wise and beneficent Providence would have decreed.15 The implied author’s comic universe thus creates a special Providence for Fielding’s “Favourites” while often, indeed everywhere else, questioning whether such a view rightly explains the real world in which we live.