BOOKS
The sad end of Tom Jones
David Nokes
HENRY FIELDING, A LIFE by Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R Battestin Routledge, £29.50, pp.738 Henry Fielding had one talent greater even than his remarkable literary gifts; that was, as his latest biographer observes, 'an extraordinary ability to run through money at speed'. No matter how quickly or successfully he wrote, he was never out of debt. In the London season of 1735-6 he had no fewer than ten plays staged — more even than Shakespeare. They included his Comic extravaganza Pasquin, dashed off in a fortnight, which became the greatest box-office hit of the decade. Yet in the pages of this new biography the dunning letters and law-suits of Fielding's creditors are more numerous even than his opening nights. In the winter of 1748-9 his master- piece Tom Jones was so skilfully hyped that the entire first edition was sold out before it was published. Yet Fielding was simul- taneously confessing to one long-suffering creditor that he 'never was more incapable of answering your demands'. It was while confined for debt in a Southwark bailiff's sponging-house that he wrote one of his most light-hearted compositions, Shamela, a satiric burlesque designed both to ridi- cule Richardson's Pamela and to pay off his coal-merchant's bill. The recklessness which brought Fielding so often to the brink of financial ruin was well illustrated in 1732 when the 'extraordinary success' of two plays The Lottery and The Modern Husband brought him almost a thousand Pounds, a fortune which he promptly lost at the gaming-tables.
Carelessness about money was a lifelong trait. Fielding was a spendthrift at Eton and a notorious debtor at Leyden universi- ty, though his tactful biographer, Martin Battestin, is reluctant to believe Fielding abandoned his university studies merely to escape his creditors, preferring to think he left town suddenly to set out on a Grand European Tour. It was also, apparently, a family trait. While Henry was languishing in the Southwark sponging-house, his father Edmund was dying in the Old Bailey where he too had been confined for debt. These were ignominious surroundings for a family which claimed kinship with the Habsburgs. In his more vainglorious mo- ments, Fielding would refer to the Empress Maria Theresa as 'my cousin of Hungary', though Gibbon later reversed the honours by predicting that 'the romance of Tom Jones . . . will outlive the palace of the Escurial, and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria'.
Poverty then was the dynamo which drove Fielding to write with such asto- nishing rapidity. He boasted he could turn out 'nine clever scenes' in a day, and the success of his early comedies, The Author's Farce, Pasquin and Tom Thumb derived from the quickfire wit of their topical satire. But Fielding's chronic lack of funds severely limited his independence. Tradi- tional accounts of his Great Mogul's Com- pany present them as originators of a daring new style of anti-Establishment satire which so goaded and provoked Robert Walpole's government that the Licensing Act of 1737 was introduced to close them down. But Battestin identifies a more ambiguous cat-and-mouse rela- tionship between the Prime Minister and his leading playwright. In 1730 Walpole was so delighted by Tom Thumb that he came to see it three times. A year later the leaders of the opposition eagerly awaited Fielding's Grub Street Opera, anticipating a savage attack on government corruption. Yet this play, extensively puffed and advertised in all the newspapers, simply never appeared. Battestin detects here the start of what was to become a familiar pattern. Fielding had allowed himself to be bought off. Some years later, with 'the horrid spectre of the debtors' prison' once more staring him in the face, Fielding again accepted money from Walpole to suppress his novel Jonathan Wild, with its attack on the gang-land mores of statesman and `great men'. The novel was not published until 1743, a year after Walpole's fall from power, when the ex-Prime Minister further rewarded Fielding's restraint by subscrib- ing for ten copies on royal paper at two guineas each.
Fielding's unease at such mercenary self-censorship is evident in an allegory he composed in which Walpole appears as a quack-doctor peddling golden pills. 'If you will stay at home and be quiet and neuter', says the mountebank minister, 'I'll give you a hundred pills. But if you will say a single word in my favour, I will give you two hundred pills. And if you can declaim handsomely on my Nostrums . . . I'll give you three hundred pills.' Being, as he says, `in an ill state of health' Fielding confesses to having taken a few pills 'to stop the publication of a book'. Just how many of Walpole's pills he swallowed is uncertain, but they had a remarkable effect on his eye-sight. Before taking the pills Walpole appeared to him like 'the Beast' from Revelations. Shortly afterwards he saw him as a genial country gent, 'with one of the pleasantest best-natured countenances I ever beheld'.
Fielding was not only a writer but also a practising lawyer who found that triumphs on stage were not always matched by success in the court-room. Mr Wilson in Joseph Andrews laments that having once been a playwright he could find no employ- ment in the law for, as one prospective client explained, 'he was afraid I should turn his deeds into plays and he should see them on the stage'. One wonders if John Mortimer ever had the same problem. For all this political opportunism, Battestin, stresses Fielding's exceptional probity in his legal career. When, shortly after the publication of Tom Jones, he became chief magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex, Fielding was assuming an office notorious for corruption. 'The Justices of Middlesex were generally the scum of the earth', said Burke. Fielding did his best both to purge the bench of mercenary 'trading justices' and to reform the capital's police. He was the first of London's high-profile police- chiefs, leading daring raids on gaming houses (perhaps in revenge for former losses) and later publishing his exploits in his own Covent Garden Journal. But the daily contact with human poverty, misery and vice had a deeply sobering effect upon him. Samuel Johnson attended a Westminster magistrates' court one winter session and found there such a 'uniform tenor of misfortune, wretchedness and profligacy,' he had no desire to repeat the experiment. Fielding lived with these con- ditions for five long years. The results were only too evident in his final novel, Amelia. Readers eager for a repeat of the heart- warming humour of Torn Jones were sev- erely disappointed. Richardson complained that Fielding wrote as if he had 'been born in a stable, or been a runner at a sponging- house'.
As a young man Fielding had presented himself as a 'doctor of mirth' proposing in his mercurial comedies `to cure all diseases incident to the mind and body by a laugh'. Twenty years later life no longer seemed a laughing matter and he solemnly de- nounced his two former favourites, Rabe- lais and Aristophanes for their subversive design to 'ridicule all sobriety, modesty, decency, virtue and religion out of the world'. Instead of Walpole's pills, the increasingly gouty Fielding was now addicted to 'Glastonbury waters', whose miraculous curative properties were heavi- ly promoted both in the Covent Garden Journal and, more curiously, in Amelia as a universal panacea.
Martin Battestin, who has been pub- lishing books on Fielding for 30 years, has now produced a thoughtful, comprehen- sive and readable biography. Ably assisted by his wife Ruthe, he has unearthed dozens of hitherto unknown letters and documents to fill in the gaps in Fielding's career. Yet, after all his explorations in the archives, Battestin still finds the truest key to Field- ing's character in his fiction. 'Tom Jones is Fielding' he boldly asserts. Sadly though, as this biography reveals, the story of Fielding's life was not the charmed ro- mance of an honest rogue, providentially rewarded with maturity, money and mar- riage. Instead we find a life devoted to ransacking the pharmacopoeia for panaceas for the disorders of mankind. Abandoning his earlier beliefs in laughter, Walpole's golden pills and even Glaston- bury waters, Fielding put his final faith in two dark and desperate remedies, Ward's Arsenical Drop and the workhouse.
Previous page
