“His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”
Next to Ivanhoe, there was no other book on my 2004 list I was less excited to read than Tom Jones. It’s one of the first English novels. It’s long. It rambles. But it’s also really, really funny, and sweet, and nasty, in a good way.
The novel is a ruthless critique of hypocrisy and deceit in the upper classes, which may lead a modern reader (like me) to see Fielding as an early champion of the ideal 20th century classless society. In fact, he agreed with his contemporaries that social stratification reflected the intentions of the Creator. This led him to hold the educated wealthy to a higher ethical standard in a kind of moral noblesse oblige. The poor, in effect, did not know any better, making them unfit for satire — though in life Fielding campaigned relentlessly to reform the British judicial system in their favor.
“What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.”
One exception to this moral rectitude is his liberal treatment of sex and love, not all that surprising for a guy who married his maid when she was six months pregnant and eventually died of cirrhosis. Characters in Tom Jones have unmarried sex all the time, although naturally this is okay for the hero and unthinkable for the heroine. The 1997 BBC miniseries (and, I understand, the 1963 movie) are duly respectful of this tradition and feature quite a lot of male and female nudity flouncing about in straw beds and strategically hiding behind furniture when caught.
“There is perhaps no surer mark of folly than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.”
The miniseries is a lot of fun — I really liked the device of having “Henry Fielding” as a character who wanders in and out of scenes quoting either from the prose or from the prefaces to each book (which have titles like “A Wonderful Long Chapter Concerning the Marvellous” and “Containing Five Pages of Paper“). Also, as mentioned, there’s lots of nudity (one Amazon reviewer calls it “very repulsive to people of high moral standards,” although they may have just been quoting from a 250-year-old review of the book).
The best thing about the miniseries, though, is that it has Brian Blessed.
Never before has an actor reached such great heights of hysterical over-acting. This guy literally chews the scenery, in one case shoving armfuls of strawberries into his face while bellowing “RARRGH!!” When Brian Blessed walks into a scene bearing a tray full of anything, that is an indication to immediately start giggling, because there is a one-hundred-percent certainty that the tray and everything on it will in short order end up hurled against the wall, onto the floor, or into his gaping maw. It is fucking awesome.
He is also in the otherwise forgettable 1983 television adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I liked the book, but hey, Sherlock Holmes stories are pretty hard not to like.