The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Henry Fielding · a novel in eighteen books · about two hundred chapters · Andrew Millar, London, in six volumes, 1749 · scored on Fielding’s English as he revised it in 1749 to 1750, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic epic in prose; foundling romance, road novel and comedy of manners in one design, with a narrator who writes its criticism as he goes
Mythos
The foundling of unknown birth, cast out, tested and found to be the heir; the expulsion from Paradise Hall and the earning of Sophia, wisdom; the two brothers; the Oedipal shadow, raised and lifted
Phase
From the foundling’s infancy to his manhood, the span of each book narrowing from years in the country to days on the road and a single night at Upton, and days in London, in 1745
Presentation
Fiction; eighteen books in three movements of six, about two hundred chapters under descriptive headings, each book opened by a prefatory essay; two interpolated histories; a narrator who addresses the reader throughout
Register
From the mock-heroic invocation and the Augustan periodic sentence to Western’s dialect, Partridge’s misplaced Latin, Mrs Honour’s malapropisms and plain statement
Scale
Two Somerset estates, the road and its inns, and London, from the gamekeeper to the peer, in the year of the rising
Governing Proposition
A foundling raised at Paradise Hall by a Somerset magistrate is turned out for his faults, takes the road towards London in the year of the Jacobite rising, and comes to prison and to the fear that he has lain with his mother before the evidence laid in the first book shows him to be the heir. The wager of the novel is that goodness is a disposition of the heart shown in acts, not a system professed, that a world which judges by appearance will mistake the generous sinner for a villain and the prudent hypocrite for a saint, and that only a plot built whole, with a narrator who makes judgment the reader’s task, can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on its own menu. The first chapter is a bill of fare, set before the reader as a host sets one before his guests, and it names a single dish: “The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature.” The claim is plain and large. What is promised is not a model of virtue, as the novel of letters had offered, but the whole of human nature, mixed, and served by a narrator who will talk to his reader at every course.
Squire Allworthy of Paradise Hall, a Somerset magistrate, finds an infant in his bed, and keeps him. The child is named Tom. Allworthy’s sister Bridget shows the foundling a sudden tenderness that no one in the house can account for. Jenny Jones, a young woman of the parish, confesses to being the mother. Each fact is set down plainly and passed over, and the narrator moves on to the next chapter heading as if nothing had been laid. The reader is given the evidence and is not told that it is evidence. Much of what the last book will need is already on the table.
The book is built in eighteen books, in three movements of six: the country, at Paradise Hall and Squire Western’s neighbouring estate; the road, from Somerset towards London, with the inn at Upton at its centre; and London. Every book opens with a prefatory chapter, an essay by the narrator on the art of the work or on its critics, eighteen in all, and the chapters, about two hundred of them, each go under a descriptive heading that runs beside the story as a second, ironic narrative. Andrew Millar published it in London, in six volumes, in February 1749, with a dedication to Lyttelton, four years after the rising in which it is set.
Movement II
Tom grows up at Paradise Hall beside Blifil, Bridget’s son, and the two boys are taught by a pair of tutors who stand for the two systems of the age. Thwackum is the divine, whose religion narrows, step by step, until it means “the Church of England”. Square is the philosopher of the eternal fitness of things. Tom is generous, careless and quick to fall; Blifil obeys every rule. The household judges the two boys by what it sees and what it is told, and what it sees is a scapegrace and a model son.
Sophia Western enters the book to a mock invocation of the winds that is also a real hymn to a woman. A few chapters later a battle breaks out in the churchyard over Molly Seagrim, and Fielding tells it as a Homeric combat in a Somerset parish. Then Square, the philosopher of the fitness of things, is found behind the rug in Molly’s garret. The system that judged the boy by his conduct is caught in conduct of its own, and the comedy makes the point without a sermon: profession is no evidence of goodness.
Sophia loves Tom, and her father, Squire Western, a Tory who hunts and halloos and speaks his own dialect, would force her on Blifil because the two estates adjoin. Bridget dies; the lawyer Dowling carries a message from her deathbed, and Blifil keeps it back. Allworthy, judging on the testimony put before him, and wrongly, turns Tom out of Paradise Hall in the sixth book. The expulsion closes the first movement. The foundling goes out from a house called Paradise for his faults, and the woman he must earn bears the name of wisdom.
Movement III
On the road the time narrows. The first books covered the years of a childhood; now a book covers days. Soldiers are marching north against the rebels of 1745, and Tom falls in with them in the seventh book. He takes up with Partridge, a Jacobite who scatters misplaced Latin, and the comedy of the road begins: inns and landladies, an army on the march, a country divided by the rising, and a hero with no house behind him.
In the eighth book Tom and Partridge meet the Man of the Hill, a recluse, and the book stops for his history: a grave tale of betrayal that ends in misanthropy, told at length. One bad experience taught him to hate the species. He is set beside a hero who has been wronged and still forgives it, and the law of the book is shown in negative. The history makes at length a point the book could make in a chapter, and it is the largest of the excursions the road permits, with the gypsies and the puppet-show.
On the way to Upton, Tom saves a woman from Northerton and takes her to the inn. She is Mrs Waters. The narrator says no more of who she has been, and the reader passes her by as Allworthy passed by Bridget’s tenderness. She is the Jenny Jones of the first book. The reader will not learn it until the book’s near catastrophe depends on it, and by then every piece of the solution will have been in view for seventeen books.
Movement IV
The ninth and tenth books cover a single night at the inn at Upton, and it is the centre of the book. Mrs Waters, Mrs Honour, Fitzpatrick, Squire Western and Sophia herself pass through the inn, its bedrooms and its doors, in a farce of almost architectural scale. The narrowing of the time is now complete: the book that began with the years of a childhood holds still on one night, and the hero’s trial comes under its greatest pressure in the middle of a comedy of wrong rooms.
Sophia has fled her father’s house rather than marry Blifil. She reaches the inn while Tom is with Mrs Waters, learns where he is, and leaves behind her muff, with her name pinned to it. The farce turns on a small object with a name on it. The evidence is left where it will be found, and Tom must now answer to Sophia for what he has been seen to be. On the road beyond, Sophia is taken for Jenny Cameron, a name from the rising, and the history of 1745 mistakes her as the parish mistook Tom.
In the eleventh book Mrs Fitzpatrick tells Sophia her own history, and it restates at length the danger Sophia is fleeing, a marriage that gives a woman to the wrong man. The road thins into the approach to the town. The second movement ends with its travellers bound for London, where the span of each book widens a little again, to days, and where the comedy of the country and the road gives way to the intrigue of the town.
Movement V
London is the third movement, the town of Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar, the masquerade and the theatre. The pressure of the road slackens into intrigue. Lady Bellaston’s polish is a new kind of speech in the book, and a new kind of appearance to be judged by. Tom’s fortunes fall, and the generous heart that the country misjudged is tried now by a society that reads only manners and reputation.
In the middle of it Partridge goes with Tom to Garrick’s Hamlet (XVI.5). He is terrified of the Ghost, and afterwards contemptuous of Garrick, since the actor behaved exactly as any man would who saw a ghost. Partridge takes the art for nature, and in doing so pays it the highest compliment it can be paid. It is the comic height of the book, and it is also the book’s argument in small: a spectator who judges by what he sees, and judges wrong.
Then the dread, briefly. Tom lies in the Gatehouse prison and is told that Mrs Waters, the woman of Upton, is Jenny Jones, the woman the parish took for his mother (XVIII.2). For a short space the comedy holds an Oedipal terror. The evidence laid in the first book lifts it: Jenny was never his mother, Bridget was, and the message from her deathbed that Blifil kept back would have said so. The foundling is the heir, the smooth brother is unmasked, and Tom, who has learned prudence, is restored and wins Sophia. The bill of fare promised human nature, and the last book serves it whole: the good heart erring and tested, and a providence the narrator guarantees.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds a plot that resists it more than almost any long novel in English. Bridget’s sudden tenderness for the foundling, Jenny Jones’s confession, the lawyer Dowling’s errand and the message from the deathbed that Blifil keeps back are laid in the first books and paid in the last; the woman Tom saves from Northerton and takes to the inn at Upton is the Jenny Jones of Book I, and the near catastrophe of Book XVIII turns on it. The three movements are required: the country makes the expulsion, the road tests the hero, London tries him and the town. What holds the axis is the licence Fielding claims for a “new province of writing” (II.1). The Man of the Hill’s history makes at length a point the book could make in a chapter; Mrs Fitzpatrick’s narrative restates Sophia’s danger; the gypsies and the puppet-show are excursions. Perhaps a tenth of the book is permitted, not compelled.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: goodness is a disposition of the heart shown in acts, not a system professed, and a world that judges by appearance and reputation will mistake the generous sinner for a villain and the prudent hypocrite for a saint. The two systems are given bodies: Thwackum, whose religion narrows to “the Church of England” (III.3), and Square, of the eternal fitness of things, found behind the rug in Molly Seagrim’s garret (V.5). Blifil, who obeys every rule, is the worst man in the book. The novel also uncovers, without a sermon, the marriage market as property law: Western would force Sophia on Blifil because the estates adjoin. The counterweight is real, since the good heart must still learn prudence. Held near the bar because the meaning is spoken by the narrator as often as it is found, and the double standard by which Tom’s lapses are forgiven and Sophia’s purity required goes unexamined.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Fielding’s register is comedy, and elevation comes chiefly as comic grandeur, which stands lower on this axis than transport or terror. It recurs. The battle in the churchyard over Molly Seagrim (IV.8) is a Homeric combat in a Somerset parish; Sophia’s entrance (IV.2) is announced with a mock invocation of the winds that is also a real hymn to a woman; the Upton night rises to a farce of almost architectural scale. Partridge at Garrick’s Hamlet (XVI.5), terrified of the Ghost and contemptuous of an actor who behaves as any man would, is the comic height of the book. The dreadful height is brief: Tom in the Gatehouse, told he may have lain with his mother (XVIII.2). What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the book never stays elevated: its ironic narrator keeps the reader from the heights he builds, and dread comes once, and briefly.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The plot is the oldest of recognition plots: the foundling of unknown birth, cast out, wandering, tested, and found at last to be the heir, with the true brother the usurper. It is load-bearing, since the book’s moral argument is carried by the revelation of birth. The estate is called Paradise Hall, Tom is expelled from it for his faults in Book VI, and the woman he must earn is called Sophia, wisdom: the expulsion, the road and the return are an Eden story told as comedy. Tom and Blifil are the brothers of Genesis, the generous elder outwitted by the smooth one. The Oedipal shadow is built, not cited: the hero meets, beds and nearly loses everything to a woman believed to be his mother. The particular stays particular, a squire’s halloo and a muff with a name pinned to it. Held near the bar because the archetypes wear the comic mask lightly, and Allworthy, Thwackum and Square are types more than myths.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the romance and the epic, Cervantes and the picaresque of Lesage and Scarron, the comic stage on which Fielding had worked until the Licensing Act of 1737, and against them Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747 to 1748), the novel of letters and inward virtue. The turn: a comic epic in prose at full scale; a narrator who steps forward in eighteen essays and claims the authority of a historian and the laws of a legislator; a plot built as an architecture rather than a string of episodes; and a hero whose sexual faults are neither hidden nor punished but weighed against his goodness. The stake was real: the book was attacked as immoral in its year. Held below the top because the first break was made in Joseph Andrews (1742), whose preface named the comic epic in prose; Tom Jones is the break completed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book argues that character must be judged on the whole evidence and not on appearance, and its plot makes the reader judge as Allworthy does, on partial testimony, and wrongly. The secret of Tom’s birth is in plain sight, in Bridget’s conduct and Jenny’s story; a second reading finds what the narrator showed and withheld. The span each book covers narrows, from the years of a childhood to days on the road and a single night at Upton, then days in London, so that the hero is tried under pressure as his fortunes fall. The three movements carry the comic theodicy of expulsion, ordeal and restoration. The prefatory chapters make judgment the reader’s own task, which is the subject of the book. Held off the top because the essays and the interpolated histories are containers rather than instruments, and a form so governed by its plot can show the inner life only from outside.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: two and three quarter centuries of criticism that keeps finding the book. Coleridge set its plot beside Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist as the most perfect plots ever planned; Scott and Thackeray wrote on it; George Eliot opens the fifteenth chapter of Middlemarch with Fielding as the great historian. In the twentieth century it was the crux of R. S. Crane’s essay on plot, of Ian Watt’s opposition of Fielding and Richardson in The Rise of the Novel (1957), of William Empson’s essay on its double irony (1958), of Wayne Booth’s study of the narrator in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and of Martin Battestin’s readings of its providential design. Its questions stay open: whether the providence is Fielding’s faith or his comedy’s machinery, whether the narrator’s irony reaches Allworthy, what the book thinks of Sophia’s obedience. Formal depth yields on every rereading. Held below the top because the comedy closes more of its own questions than the deepest books do.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is English prose fiction of the eighteenth century, and the European novel as it took form. The force is a reorganisation of what the new form could be: with Richardson’s, Fielding’s is one of the two founding models of the English novel, with its omniscient and commenting narrator, its plot of total design, a whole society across the classes from gamekeeper to peer, and comedy as a means of moral knowledge. Held below the top because the Richardsonian line of inwardness proved the stronger in the European novel after it, and Cervantes made the larger rupture before it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Smollett and Sterne answered it at once, Sterne by turning its narrator into a game in Tristram Shandy; Scott called Fielding the father of the English novel; Thackeray measured his own constraints against it in the preface to Pendennis; Dickens’s David Copperfield reads it as a boy; and George Eliot’s narrator descends from its narrator.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over two hundred and seventy-seven years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Fielding revised it, and there is nothing to charge. Presence: in print without a break since 1749, translated into the main European languages, a set text in English studies across the world, filmed by Tony Richardson to a screenplay by John Osborne (1963), which won the Academy Award for best picture, and serialised by the BBC (1997). Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the prefatory chapters’ quarrels with critics, the politics of 1745 and the dedication to Lyttelton are history now. The charge falls on presence. The book is read less widely outside the academy than its place in literary history implies, and less than the most read novels of the century after it. It has never been neglected, so the charge holds the figure down without taking it lower.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Fielding’s English. The construction is the height of the making: some two hundred chapters timed and laid so that nothing important is wasted, and the solution, when it comes in Book XVIII, was in view from Book I. The prose is the Augustan periodic sentence made a comic instrument, balanced and ironic, capable of the mock-heroic and of plain statement within a page; the bill of fare, “The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature” (I.1), sets the tone. The voices are kept apart: Western’s dialect and halloos, Partridge’s misplaced Latin, Mrs Honour’s malapropisms, Lady Bellaston’s polish. The chapter headings are a second, ironic narrative. Charged: inner life is narrated rather than rendered, Sophia and Allworthy are drawn flatter than Western, and the London books run on intrigue at a lower pressure than the road.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Man of the Hill’s history, a grave tale of betrayal ending in a recluse’s misanthropy, and the Upton farce of bedroom doors and a muff; or Western’s hunting halloo and the terror of incest in the Gatehouse. One law governs them: human nature is mixed, the good heart errs and is tested, appearance deceives, and a comic providence restores the deserving when they have learned prudence. The Man of the Hill is the law’s negative, a man whom one bad experience taught to hate the species, set beside a hero who forgives it. The incest terror is the same law at its darkest, defused by the evidence the plot laid. The range is wide, from Homeric parody to the prison. Charged: the providence that resolves the plot is guaranteed by the narrator rather than tested, and the sentimental register of Sophia’s scenes sits apart from the farce around them.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders, held in one plot. The family and inheritance: two estates, a foundling, a disinherited heir, a forced marriage. The law: Allworthy as magistrate, Dowling the lawyer, the Gatehouse prison. The church and philosophy, in Thwackum and Square and the curate Supple. The state and history: the rising of 1745, the army on the march, Western’s Toryism against his sister’s Whig politics. Labour and class, from the gamekeeper Black George, the servants, landladies, soldiers and gypsies up to Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar. Town and country, the road and the inn, the theatre and the masquerade; sex and money throughout; the natural order in the Somerset country and the hunt. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field on which appearance and the heart are weighed. Held below the top because consciousness is thin, every mind given from outside by the narrator, and the sacred is asserted as providence more than lived.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.0. Two hundred and seventy-seven years in print without a break, with nothing of the text lost; one of the two founding models of the English novel, answered at once by Smollett and Sterne and carried through Scott, Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot; and a construction of some two hundred chapters in which the solution of Book XVIII was in view from Book I.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.9, held by a register of comedy: elevation comes as comic grandeur, in the churchyard battle, Sophia’s entrance and Partridge at Hamlet; the ironic narrator keeps the reader from the heights he builds; and dread comes once, in the Gatehouse. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.3: the Man of the Hill, Mrs Fitzpatrick’s history, the gypsies and the puppet-show, perhaps a tenth of the book, permitted rather than compelled. Then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: a disclosure spoken by the narrator as often as found, and archetypes worn lightly under the comic mask.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, published by Andrew Millar, London, in six volumes in February 1749. It is scored as the novel in eighteen books as Fielding left it after his revisions of 1749 to 1750, the text the modern critical editions give, with its prefatory chapters, its chapter headings and its dedication to Lyttelton, which are part of the work. The revisions are verbal and local; none touches the structure, and nothing here turns on a variant. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Fielding’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the bill of fare of I.1, the “new province of writing” of II.1 and Thwackum’s “the Church of England” of III.3. Coleridge, Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, Crane, Watt, Empson, Booth and Battestin are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work; Tony Richardson’s film (1963) and the BBC serial (1997) are its afterlife. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact chapter count and the word count, the exact time each book covers, the edition that carried the last revisions, the chapter counts of the two interpolated histories and the date of the first French version, are not given. Citations are by book and chapter: XVI.5 is Book XVI, chapter 5.