Henry Fielding – Tom Jones

B Contemporary Criticism

Tom Jones was widely read and widely reviewed when it first appeared. It continues to be the subject of scholarly interest today. That it was still being commented on 80 years after its publication by literary luminaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge⁶⁴ and Sir Walter Scott⁶⁵ is a measure of its significance. Tom Jones, like Fielding himself, polarised people.

Coleridge believed Tom Jones had one of “the three most perfect plots ever planned.”⁶⁶ Coleridge was impressed Fielding’s ability to convey a character’s essence independent of the character’s deeds: “If I want a servant or mechanic, I wish to know what he does: – but of a friend, I must know what he is. And in no writer is this momentous distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding.”⁶⁷ Scott, as the Introduction notes, considered Fielding to be the father of the English

⁶⁴ (1772–1834): Coleridge’s works include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816).

⁶⁵ (1771–1832): Scott’s works include The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rob Roy (1818) and Ivanhoe (1819). Like Fielding, Scott was a practising lawyer and judge. Scott was called to the Bar on 11 July 1792. He was appointed Sheriff-Deputy (the equivalent of a county judge) for Selkirk on 16 December 1799, and on 8 March 1806, he was appointed as a Clerk of the Court of Session in Edinburgh. For more information see http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/biography/index.html (accessed 28 July 2007).
⁶⁶ Table Talk (1834) quoted in Neil Compton (ed) Henry Fielding – Tom Jones – A Casebook (Macmillan, London, 1970) 33. This piece continues with a less than flattering reference to Richardson: “To take [Fielding] up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day in May.”
⁶⁷ H N Coleridge (ed) Literary Remains (1836) quoted in Compton, ibid, 34.
novel. In a piece published in 1821 he said: “[Tom Jones] is truth and human nature itself, and there lies the inestimable advantage which it possesses over all previous fictions of this kind.”⁶⁸

Rival novelist, Samuel Richardson⁶⁹ was unimpressed. He insisted that the autobiographical nature of Fielding’s plots and characters reflected the poverty of his own imagination.⁷⁰ Richardson refused to read Tom Jones and was alarmed at the number of his friends who did!⁷¹ Nor was Samuel Johnson enamoured with Fielding – or Tom Jones:⁷²

“Fielding [is] … a blockhead … a barren rascal … Richardson used to say … had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler

… [T]here is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all Tom Jones.”


Old England ⁷³ described Tom Jones as “a motley history of bastardism, fornication and adultery”. ⁷⁴ While the writer acknowledges the use of those themes as plot devices, the balance of this paper, beginning with the following section on the law and language in Tom Jones, focuses on Fielding’s particular, contemporary portrayal of lawyers and the law. In the writer’s view this is the single most significant recurring theme in Tom Jones and its content, and the way in which Fielding draws the reader in to his legal world, reveals the consummate skill of the lawyer as writer.

⁶⁸ “Henry Fielding” in The Lives of the Novelists (1821) quoted in Compton, above n 66, 35.

⁶⁹ Richardson (1689–1761) was the author of Pamela: or Virtue Revisited (1740), parodied by Fielding in An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741). Shamela, the reader is informed on the title page, is intended to refute and expose “the notorious Falshoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela”.
⁷⁰ Battestin, above n 7, 5.
⁷¹ Rogers, above n 1, 160.
⁷² James Boswell, Christopher Hibbert (ed) The Life of Samuel Johnson (Penguin Books, London, 1979) 159. In one of life’s little ironies, on 13 March 1750 Johnson (1709–1784) appeared before Fielding to stand surety (a bond of £20) for Mary Peyton, the wife of “one of the drudges who toiled in Johnson’s attic to produce his great Dictionary.” Battestin speculates whether this “brief encounter between these two proud men contributed to the forming of Johnson’s famous opinion of Fielding …?”, (ie the one quoted above). See Battestin, above n 7, 504.
⁷³ A newspaper/journal opposed to the Henry Pelham-led government Fielding supported.
⁷⁴ Rogers, above n 1, 160.

4. 
   LAW AND THE LANGUAGE IN TOM JONES
   

Fielding litters Tom Jones with references to lawyers, attorneys, legal hearings and pseudo-hearings, issues of law, language derived from the courts, and questions of evidence. Mutter expresses the view that while Fielding’s theatrical career is responsible for the humour in Tom Jones, it is his legal training as evinced in the legal language, the parodying of legal institutions and personnel, and the themes of mercy and justice that dominate the book.⁷⁵

Section A contains an analysis of those themes of justice and mercy – and judgment. Section B details Fielding’s use of analogy to establish the “trial” as a recurring theme. Section C considers Fielding’s use of metaphor, with particular reference to Squire Western and the hunting themes which link directly to contemporary game laws. This section introduces the analysis of Squire Allworthy. Section D identifies how Fielding establishes a role for the reader as judge (or juror) in the legal case that is Tom Jones.

1.