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Tom Jones and “His Egyptian Majesty”: Fielding's Parable of Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin C. Battestin
Martin C. Battestin*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Extract

Perhaps the most curious episode in Henry Fielding's masterpiece occurs toward the end of Tom Jones's journey (Book xii, Chapters xi–xii), when Tom, Partridge, and their less than Virgilian guide lose their way in the darkness of a stormy winter's night—a night, indeed, so obscure and inclement that Partridge, whose Jacobitism extends to a belief in demons as firm as that of James I, believes the company to be enchanted. Having strayed from the plain high road to Coventry into a dirty lane, the wayfarers at length discern the lights of a barn and hear the confused noises of merrymaking from within. Inquiring the road to Coventry, Tom, together with his companions, is given shelter and hospitality in the barn by a strange, jovial crew who prove to be “no other than a Company of Egyptians, or as they are vulgarly called Gypsies … now celebrating the Wedding of one of their Society” (xii, xii).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 68 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Quotations from Tom Jones are from the first edition (1749), 6 vols.

2 See Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1918), ii, 150–152; and F. Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (Oxford, 1952), ii, 651.

3 The bibliography of Goady's several editions of the Apology is quite complex. (1) A first edition, based on The Life and Adventures of Carew (Exeter, 1745), was published in September–October 1749; see The Gentleman's Magazine, xix (October 1749), 480. (2) A second edition, bearing the date 10 February 1750 at the close of the prefatory address to the reader, was revised by a writer whose political sympathies lay with the Opposition; this is the first edition to include the mock account of the government, etc., of the gypsies, and the first to pretend that Carew was their king. (3) A later edition, erroneously called the second, was published in November 1751 and is the first to draw the facetious “parallel” between Carew and Tom Jones, and the first to include a satiric dedication “To the Worshipful Justice Fielding.” A discussion of these bibliographical problems may be found in C. H. Wilkinson, ed., The King of the Beggars: Bamfylde-Moore Carew (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931), pp. vii–ix; but even Wilkinson loses his way amidst the tangle of editions. A briefer but more accurate account is that of J. Paul de Castro, N&Q, 12 S., viii (12 February 1921), 132–133.

4 See A Select Collection of Old Plays (London, 1744), Vol. iv.

5 See Andrew Wright, Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1965), p. 95; and Philip Stevick, “Fielding and the Meaning of History,” PMLA, lxxix (December 1964), 563–564.

6 The Museum, ii (1746), 81–82.

7 “Egyptians” was the name officially used in statutes passed against the gypsies during the reigns of Henry VIII, Philip and Mary, and Elizabeth. Fielding identifies these statutes in An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), Section vi; see Fielding's Works, ed. W. E. Henley (London: William Heinemann, 1903), xiii, 89. Before Heinrich Grellmann proposed a new theory tracing the gypsies to northern India, the notion of their Egyptian descent was universally accepted. See Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gypsies, Being an Historical Enquiry, concerning the Manner of Life, Œconomy, Customs and Conditions of these People in Europe, and their Origin, trans. Matthew Raper (London, 1787), Sec. Ii, Ch. iv. Grellmann's account, furthermore, provides ample proof, if any should be required, that Fielding's gypsies were not drawn from the life, but are entirely creatures of the novelist's imagination.

8 Reflections on the Natural Foundation of the High Antiquity of Government, Arts, and Sciences in Egypt (Oxford, 1743), p. 19. See also William Warburton, who throughout The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, i (1738), ii (London, 1741), recalls the “boasted Wisdom of Egypt … in the Science of Legislation and Civil Policy” (i, 797).

9 Translation of Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians … and Grecians, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (London, 1738–40), i, 29–31, 35.

10 Diodorus Siculus, History, trans. C. H. Oldfather (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1933), i, lxxviii, 1–2. Cf. Rollin, i, 49.

11 Charles Perry, A View of the Levant (London, 1743), p. 238. For a discussion of Perry's work see below, pp. 72–73.

12 See A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain (1745), A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender (1745), The True Patriot (5 November 1745–17 June 1746), A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for two Court Candidates, and an honest Alderman of the Country Party (1747), A Proper Answer to a late Scurrilous Libel (1747), The Jacobite's Journal (5 December 1747–5 November 1748), and A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury (1749).

13 See The Jacobite's Journal, 19 December 1747.

14 The list of subscribers to Perry's book includes, for example, the Duke of Bedford, Chesterfield, Cobham, Dodington, and Lyttelton, together with a number of Fielding's other friends and patrons, such as Dr. Brewster, Dr. Harington, Dr. Ranby, and “Beau” Nash.

15 See The British Magazine, iii (February 1748), 96; and The Gentleman's Magazine, xviii (March 1748), 144.

16 While he was still writing for the Opposition, Fielding had used the device of parodying a scientific treatise to ridicule the government's policy of subsidizing the Hanoverian troops: see An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Hanover Rat (1744) and passages in Some Papers Proper to be Read before the R—l Society, Concerning the Terrestrial Chrysipus, Golden-Foot or Guinea (1743). On the question of Fielding's authorship of the former pamphlet see Gerard E. Jensen, “A Fielding Discovery,” Yale University Library Gazette, x (1935), 23–32; for a discussion of the political allusions in the latter piece see Henry K. Miller, Essays on Fielding's ‘Miscellanies’: A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton, 1961), pp. 325–326.

17 De Toryismo, Liber, pp. 11–15. The pamphlet is in the British Museum; call number: 1080.i.15.

18 Hoadly's sermon was first published in 1708. It was later included in The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider'd, 4th ed. (London, 1710) and 5th ed. (1718); and it was separately reprinted at Edinburgh at the time of the rebellion in 1745.

19 John Hoadly, ed., The Works of Benjamin Hoadly (London, 1773), ii, 114.

20 The probability that Fielding had Hoadly's discourse specifically in mind while writing this leader is strengthened by the fact that Hoadly's was the only sermon on this text (I Samuel viii) published since 1660. See S. Letsome, An Index to the Sermons Published since the Restoration (1751), p. 13; in the British Museum. Fielding refers again to this text in The Jacobite's Journal, 15 October 1748.

21 From Hoadly, “Serious Advice to the Good People of England,” Works, i, 616: the Jacobites, Hoadly here admonishes, are those “whose principles naturally draw you back to Egyptian Darkness and Slavery.” Compare, too, “A Letter concerning Allegiance,” where Hoadly regrets that Jacobitical spirit which, “after so miraculous a Deliverance as we have had, may endanger our Return again into Egypt” (i, 648).

The Jacobite's Journal for 12 March 1748 contains two references associating the Jacobites and Egypt. One occurs in “The Genealogy of a Jacobite” submitted by “Cambr. Britannicus”: “Infallibility begot the Pope and his Brother in the Time of Egyptian Darkness.” In the leader itself the wily Jacobites are associated with Proteus, “an Egyptian Conjurer.”

22 Fielding often used the metaphor of a violent tempest to represent the condition of England during the Jacobite uprising. See, for example, The Jacobite's Journal for 21 May 1748 (already discussed in relation to the gypsy episode): “Thunder and Lightning, Storms and Tempests, are the Seasons when the Jews expect the Arrival of this Blessing [i.e., the Messiah]. In Times of War and public Danger, which may be called Political Tempests, the Jacobites look for the coming of their Lord.” In A Dialogue between a Gentleman of London, Agent for two Court Candidates, and an honest Alderman of the Country Party (1747) he represents the nation in 1745 as weathering the “Storms” and “Hurricane” of wars abroad and rebellion at home (p. 67). Compare, too, The Jacobite's Journal (22 October 1748) where he employs the metaphor of a storm to describe the war with France.

23 Fielding's term for the Jacobite rebels in Tom Jones (vii, xi) and in A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain (1745), where he speaks of the insurrection as an “Incursion of Barbarians” and asks: “Shall we open our Gates to a Banditti, a Rabble of Thieves and Outlaws …?” (p. 44).

24 See, for example, Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson and Richardson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1964).

25 For a discussion of the episodes in Joseph Andrews see Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 94–95; and “Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews,” PQ, xxxix (January 1960), esp. pp. 49–53. On the use of the Aeneid in Amelia see George Sherburn, “Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation,” ELB, iii (1936), 2–4; Lyall H. Powers, “The Influence of the Aeneid on Fielding's Amelia,” MLN, lxxi (May 1956), 330–336; and Maurice Johnson, Fielding's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), pp. 139–156.