Tom Jones was perpetually in delicate situations. As Henry Fielding remarked in one of his digressions,” It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions are intrinsically good; you must take care that they appear so.” Tom was slow in learning this lesson. From the moment he is introduced, we expect trouble. “We are obliged to bring our hero to the stage,” Fielding lamented, “in a much more disadvantageous manner than we could wish; and to declare honestly, even at his first appearance, that it was the universal opinion of all Mr. Allworthy’s family that he was certainly born to be hanged.”
William Hogarth. plate 8. Tate:The final scene is set in Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), an institution for the poor and insane. He is lying in the foreground almost stripped of clothes and thus his social pretensions. Sarah weeps by his side knowing that Tom is beyond her help. Like prisons and other hospitals, Bedlam was open to paying visitors. Within this scene an aristocratic lady and her maid are standing towards the left, amused and disgusted by the antics of the unfortunate people around them. The irony is that, while Tom had set out to mimic the aristocratic lifestyle, he finishes by being one of its entertainments.
We learn at our first encounter with Tom that he is a confirmed thief. And as we progress into the narrative, we observe our hero acquiring more serious vices with something approaching Faustian facility. He has three mistresses, one of whom pays him for his services. Ultimately, however, our hero is happily married, well established, and has acquired “a discretion and prudence very uncommon in one of his lively parts.” …
Thomas Rowlandson
Goodness fascinated Fielding. It did most eighteenth-century writers: “The Vicar of Wakefield” by Oliver Goldsmith is a novel concerned with little else. Indeed, the goodness of men preoccupied an eighteenth-century novelist as much as the loneliness and alienation of the individual does today. In many ways, it is the constant theme of Fielding’s books, as much a part of his last two masterpieces , “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” , as “Jonathan Wild” and his other writings.
The humanity that Fielding knew lived in a brutal, depraved, drink-sodden, debauched jungle. As a barrister he had spent months with the human flotsam and jetsam that washed in and out of the courts of justice. When in 1749 Fielding at last received a plum of patronage for his years of political propaganda, it was the post of stipendiary magistrate at Bow Street, London; and day after day he had to sit in court dealing with people of the most vicious quarter of London. Fielding knew all too well the human vultures who preyed on the weak, the stupid, the gullible, and the feckless.
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Thomas Rowlandson
G.M. Godden :The last great cause of crime which the Enquiry considers, and with much learning and detail, is the condition of the poor. Here Fielding’s views on our modern problem of the unemployed may be read. And here occurs a splendid denunciation of
the ’House of Correction’ or Bridewell of the period, a prison for idle and disorderly persons where ”they are neither to be corrected nor employed: and where with the conversation of many as bad and sometimes worse than themselves they are sure to be improved in the Knowledge and confirmed in the Practice of Iniquity.” The most impudent of the wretches brought before him, Fielding tells us, were always ”such as have been before acquainted with the Discipline of Bridewell.” These prisons, from which the disorderly and idle came out, ”much more idle and disorderly than they went in,” were, says Fielding, no other than ”Schools of Vice, Seminaries of Idleness, and Common-sewers of Nastiness and Disease.” …
John Collet. "It is safe to say that selling sex constituted a significant, and visible, part of urban culture in Georgian England. While the popular imagination has always been stirred by the figure of the prostitute (for better or for worse), over the course of the eighteenth century the multitude of ways in which she could be represented meant that the ‘whore’ remained a particularly prevalent character in popular and political discourse. Alongside the glamorous courtesans, beautiful young nymphs, sinfully happy hookers and hideous wretches offering their services for "a pint of wine and a shilling", The Victim gives a face to a figure who became an increasingly familiar creature from around the 1740s onwards – the young innocent betrayed into a life of vice and exploitation, by false promises or by force."
Fielding’s daily experience was of the dregs of human society. His knowledge of human corruption was perhaps wider, if not deeper, than that of any novelist who has yet lived. In this world, Fielding quickly realized, the ruthless, the tough, the men of power and money, could all too easily win: they could bribe, kidnap, even kill, and more often than not, get away with it. Life in eighteenth-century England was very uncertain; the whirligig of Fate turned fast, and its effects could be cataclysmic. Neither society nor the law offered much protection. Arson and robbery, as well as kidnappings, duels and murders, grew to monstrous proportions, so monstrous that Fielding felt compelled to direct public attention to this vast increase in crime in his excellent pamphlet, “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers ( 1751) .
Hogarth. Four judges. Godden:Of these evils none pressed more cruelly on the honest citizens than the prevalence and brutality of street robberies. To the well-protected Englishman of to-day the London of 1750 would seem a nightmare of lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us, attacked their victims with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and hacked them with cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has recorded how he himself was engaged on five differe
urders, all committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of one week.Yet, in the midst of this despair, Fielding came across a few, rare human beings whose goodness proved indestructible. who bore the outrageous blows of fortune with stoical fortitude, who retained, in the midst of violence and vice, an unsullied innocence. No matter how ill the world treated them, they remained good in its deepest human sense- charitable, forgiving, compassionate, honest- not gloomy and foreboding like Job but buoyant and resilient with hope. Such beings were rare, but htey fascinated Fielding quite as much as the world of vice and cruelty through which they made their pilgrimage. These natural innocents, however, were not the only human personalities to capture Fielding’s sympathy and imagination in the violent world of eighteenth-century England.
They were the rare and wonderful creatures who fortified his faith in human nature- Parson Adams, Squire Allworthy, Mr. Heartfree- such men existed in Fielding’s world, and Fielding felt nothing but admiration for their characters; but his appetite for life was too strong, his sympathies too broad, to reject the rest of mankind.
Hogarth. The Politician. Trusler:From the tie-wig, stockings, high-quartered shoes, and sword, I should suppose it was painted about the year 1730, when street robberies were so frequent in the metropolis, that it was customary for men in trade to wear swords, not to preserve their religion and liberty from foreign invasion, but to defend their own pockets from “domestic collectors.”
aaaIn “Jonathan Wild” Fielding painted the portrait of a human monster who moved through the jungle of London’s underground with the certainty of a leopard: killing without compunction, raping where he could not seduce, missing no chance of a swindle or a theft, even picking the Ordinary of Newgate’s pocket as he was about to swing into eternity. Wild wallows in his evil, yet with such gusto, such wolfish appetite for life, that he becomes almost forgivable, almost heroic.
Fielding could never resist gusto. He was a very sick man by the time he came to be a novelist, and this, no doubt, gave him a heightened sense of the value of instinctive life, its richness and its satisfactions. Certainly, these two preoccupations- his obsession with goodness and his delight in gusto- are the driving forces, and what supports the tension in his masterpiece, “Tom Jones” .
Trusler:About the time when these plates were first published, which was in the year 1747, there was a noted house in Chick Lane, Smithfield, that went by the name of the Blood-Bowl House, so called from the numerous scenes of blood that were almost daily carried on there; it being a receptacle for prostitutes and thieves; where every species of delinquency was practised; and where, indeed, there seldom passed a month without the commission of some act of murder.
Heroes, notwithstanding the high Ideas, which by the means of Flatterers they may entertain of themselves, or the World may conceive of them, have certainly more of Moral than Divine about them. (Fielding, Tom Jones 9.5; 1.509)
. . . so did this bowl of rack punch influence the fates of all the principal characters in this “Novel without a Hero,” which we are now relating. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair 93)
Even before Thackeray’s debunking of the central role of the fictional hero in Vanity Fair, the variety of heroes in British fiction was more subtle and often less obvious than many readers recognized. Henry Fielding may have written the first “novel without a hero” in Jonathan Wild (1743), and concluded his career in fiction with another, of a very different order, Amelia (1751). From his first foray into fiction with Shamela (1741), Fielding continually experiments with the concept of the hero, writing novels with and without heroes over a century before Vanity Fair would specifically call attention to the issue. And he clearly uses as a structural basis of his works the counterplay between “literary” and “real life” heroes. ( Larry Laban )
Sally Feldman:When Samuel Richardson’s beleaguered servant girl, Pamela, resists the lascivious advances of her master, she is preserving her honour, more precious to her than all the worldly goods he can offer her. On the other hand, by doing so she lands the worldly goods as well, so that there’s a delicious dual meaning to the novel’s subtitle, Virtue Rewarded. And that’s the point that Richardson’s contemporary Henry Fielding makes in his wicked satire Shamela, where the withholding of sexual favour is ridiculed as a calculating ruse to trap a wealthy man. Virtue Rewarded has been a dominant literary theme ever since the publication of that first English novel. For every virginal Elizabeth Bennett who wins her man and his estate, there’s a sprightly Lydia tarnishing the family name.
ADDENDUM:
The Enquiry concludes with offering some more immediate palliatives for the diseased state of the body politic, in the removing of actual ’Encouragement to Robbery.’ First among such encouragements Fielding places the fact that ”the Thief disposes of his goods with almost as much safety as the honestest Tradesman”; and he urged the need of legislation to prohibit the amazing advertisements by which our ancestors promised to give rewards for the recovery of stolen goods ” and no questions asked .” Such advertisements he declares to be ”in themselves so very scandalous and of such pernicious Consequence, that if Men are not ashamed to own they prefer an old Watch or a Diamond Ring to the Good of [the] Society it is a pity some effectual Law was not contrived to prevent their giving this public Countenance to Robbery for the future.”
Trusler:Behold him, on the dreadful morn of execution, drawn in a cart (attended by the sheriff’s officers on horseback, with his coffin behind him) through the public streets to Tyburn, there to receive the just reward of his crimes,— a shameful ignominious death. The ghastly appearance of his face, and the horror painted on his countenance, plainly show the dreadful situation of his mind; which we must imagine to be agitated with shame, remorse, confusion, and terror. The careless position of the Ordinary at the coach window is intended to show how inattentive those appointed to that office are of their duty, leaving it to others, which is excellently expressed by the itinerant preacher in the cart, instructing from a book of Wesley’s . Mr. Hogarth has in this print, digressing from the history and moral of the piece, taken an opportunity of giving us a humorous representation of an execution, or a Tyburn Fair: such days being made holidays, produce scenes of the greatest riot, disorder, and uproar; being generally attended by hardened wretches, who go there, not so much to reflect upon their own vices, as to commit those crimes which must in time inevitably bring them to the same shameful end.
And, under this head, he advocates legislation either for the regulating of pawnbrokers, or for the entire extirpation of a ”Set of Miscreants which, like other Vermin, harbour only about the Poor and grow fat sucking their Blood.” The subsequent legislation by which prosecutors were recompensed for loss of time and money, when prosecuting the ’wolves in society,’ may be added to the measures forseen if not actually promoted by Fielding’s enlightened zeal. And in nothing was he more in advance of his age than in his denunciation of that scandal of the eighteenth century, the conduct and frequency of public executions. It has taken our legislators a hundred years to provide the swift, solemn and private executions urged by Henry Fielding, in place of the brutal ’Tyburn holiday’ enacted every six weeks for the benefit of the Georgian mob.
Another matter demanding legislation was the great probability of escape afforded to thieves by the narrow streets and the common-lodging houses of the day. Of the latter, crowded with miserable beds from the cellar to the garret, let out, at twopence a night the single beds, and threepence the double ones, Fielding draws a picture as terrible as any of his friend Hogarth’s plates. And he concludes ”Nay I can add what I myself once saw in the Parish of Shoreditch where two little Houses were emptied of near seventy Men and Women,” and where the money found on all the occupants (with the exception of a pretty girl who was a thief) ”did not amount to one shilling.” In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of ”all Morality, Decency and Modesty,” with the street for bed if they fall sick (”and it is almost a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be well”), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery, ”the Wonder in Fact is,” cries Fielding, ”… that we have not a thousand more Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one of their Capacity and Courage.” And, leaving for a moment legislative
reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession.
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