Fielding's Tom Jones

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" (1749) by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), one of the most influential of the early English novels and a favourite of Dickens. Coleridge wrote that it had one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned'. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays that were so painful for their targets in government that, from then until the 1960s, plays required approval before being staged; seeking other ways to make a living, Fielding turned to law and to fiction. 'Tom Jones' is one of the great comic novels, with the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest raconteur. While other authors might present Tom as a rake and a libertine, Fielding makes him the hero for his fundamental good nature, so offering a caution not to judge anyone too soon, if ever.

With

Judith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Henry Power Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter

And

Charlotte Roberts Associate Professor of English Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (Routledge, 1989)

J. M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2012) S. Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

J.A. Downie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Henry Fielding (ed. John Bender and Simon Stern), The History of Tom Jones (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Henry Fielding (ed. Tom Keymer), The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin Classics, 1996)

Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Wiley Blackwell, 2000)

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (first published 1972; Routledge, 2021)

Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.0	This is in our time from BBC Radio 4,
0:07.4	and this is one of more than a thousand episodes
0:10.0	you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this
0:14.6	edition you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:18.6	Hello the history of Tom Jones founding by Henry Field, is one of the most influential of the early English
0:25.1	novels, a favourite of Dickens and Coleridge, and a page-turner, both when it came out in 1749 and
0:32.1	today. Fielding had made his name in the theatre with satirical plays
0:36.5	and Tom Jones has the tightness of a farce and the ambition of a Greek epic as told by the finest
0:42.4	raconteur.
0:43.9	And while the wreckage Tom might be the villain in the hands of other authors, Fielding makes him
0:48.3	the hero for his fundamental good nature, a caution not to judge anyone too soon if ever.
0:55.0	With me to discuss Tom Jones by Henry Fieldy.
0:58.0	Henry Power, Professor of English Literature, the University of Exeter,
1:01.0	Charlotte Roberts, Associate Professor of English Literature, University
1:04.5	College London, and Judith Holly, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway University
1:09.9	of London.
1:10.9	Judith, let's begin with feelings childhood, not dissimilar from that of his hero. Can you tell us about it?
1:16.0	Well, on the face of it, Fielding's childhood was a very good one. He was born into a good family in 1707. His mother, Sarah, was well descended, the gentleman
1:26.4	in her family. His father, Edmund Fielding, was a colonel and later rose through the army and was related to aristocrats.
1:35.0	They claimed that they were related to the Habsburg
1:38.0	royal family and Henry Fielding had this huge protruding jaw
	...

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