A Partridge in the Family Tree: Fixity, Mobility, and Community in Tom Jones
Hilary Teynor, University of Wisconsin
Volume 17, no. 3, April 2005
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
The title page of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) immediately alerts the reader to the protagonist’s dubious lineage: who are the foundling’s father and mother? Consider, for example, Tom’s immediate familial and pseudo-familial connections: he has a biological father in the clergyman’s son Summer and a mother in Bridget Allworthy, an adoptive father in Squire Allworthy, an initially resistant father-in-law in Squire Western, and in loco parentis schoolmasters in Thwackum and Square. Benjamin Partridge and Jenny Jones count as putative parents of Tom Jones, with Blifil as both his half-brother and foster brother. Sophia Western, on the other hand, has substitute mothers in her aunt Mrs Western and Lady Bellaston because of her own mother’s absence. Later in the novel, thematically important issues of paternity arise with Nightingale, who is a son and a father-to-be, and his uncle, who acts as a quasi-father. The narrative also includes Tom and Partridge’s response to a Hamlet performance, a play that turns on father-son and fraternal relationships. Such tangled relationships that expose the conflicts of heredity and contractual obligations are not merely curiosities of novelistic design, but rather are key to understanding how the novel offers a critique of existing social structures.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Family” include:
“If a man dared act for himself”: Family Romance and Independence in Frances Burney’s Cecilia
by MEGAN WOODWORTH (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
L’Orphelin de la famille: Le Paradigme de l’enfant/manuscrit trouvé dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle
by JAN HERMAN (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
Historicizing Domestic Relations: Sarah Scott’s Use of the “Household Family”
by ANN VAN SANT (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
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