The Old Order and the New Novel of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Narrative Authority in Fielding and Smollett
John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
Volume 2, no. 3, April 1990
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ABSTRACT
Having lost the scent of his runaway Sophia in book 15 of Tom Jones, Squire Western sits brooding, his affliction doubled by the blame heaped on him by his sister. But Sophia is betrayed by a letter from her cousin, Harriet Fitzpatrick, who reveals that the runaway is harboured in London by Lady Bellaston. Throwing his pipe in the fire and “huzza[ing] for Joy,” the squire proposes to reclaim his daughter, armed with his legal rights: “I have not been in the Country so long without having some Knowledge of Warrants and the Law of the Land. I know I may take my own wherever I can find it. Shew me my own Daughter, and if I don’t know how to come at her, I’ll suffer you to call me Fool as long as I live. There be Justices of Peace in London, as well as in other Places.” His sister, subtle and deep politician as she fancies herself, replies that Lady Bellaston is beyond such law: “Do you really imagine, Brother, that the House of a Woman of Figure is to be attacked by Warrants and brutal Justices of the Peace?” What she counsels is properly ritualized social negotiation, conducted according to unwritten protocols of propriety and deference … Aunt Western understands aristocratic power, and she here invokes a network of patrons and clients, friends in a special eighteenth-century sense, whose relationships take precedence in practice over the legal structure her brother trusts.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Henry Fielding” include:
Henry Fielding Reinvents the Afterlife
by REGINA M. JANES (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
La Place’s Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé and Candide
by E.M. LANGILLE (ECF 19.3, Spring 2007)
Social Rank, “The Rise of the Novel,” and Whig Histories of Eighteenth-Century Fiction
by NICHOLAS HUDSON (ECF 17.4, July 2005)
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