Black George and the Black Act
John Allen Stevenson, University of Colorado
Volume 8, no. 3, April 1996
©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
In the flood of reversals and recognitions that marks the closing chapters of Tom Jones, one act of restoration can easily be lost. Given that Tom, in a matter of hours, goes from prison and the prospect of the gallows to a triumphant place as Allworthy’s heir and Sophia’s husband, the recovery of the £500 in banknotes he lost on the day he was exiled from Paradise Hall seems like a small matter, no more than a precise balancing of the books in this, the most symmetrical of novels. But among the few brush-strokes that Fielding employs to conclude this business, there is one odd comment — odd, at least, for anyone with a knowledge of eighteenth-century criminal law. Allworthy, having discovered the money and identified Black George as the culprit, asks Lawyer Dowling what legal recourse he has. The question is a tricky one, and Dowling is cautious. George did not, after all, directly steal the money; he found it on the ground and kept it. The lawyer answers that George “might be indicted on the Black Act; but said, as it was a Matter of some Nicety, it would be proper to go to Counsel.” A few chapters later, he reports that no criminal charges are possible, only an action of trover, by which the banknotes could be recovered as lost property.
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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