George Lord Lyttelton

ney of Jones up to London and his experiences in towncovers five weeks in November and December, 1745, while companies of foot are on the way north to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland, and the young Chevalier is threatening to march on the capital. Squire Western is one of those English Jacobites whom Fielding scored in his newspapers; his sister is a Hanoverian-"a Hanoverian rat," her brother calls her-whose political principles are derived from the numerous Whig pamphlets in circulation; and Sophia, because of her great beauty, is suspected, when on her travels, of being Jenny Cameron, one of the Chevalier's "ladies" trying to escape capture. Again, like Fielding himself, Tom Jones is "a hearty well-wisher to the glorious cause of liberty, and of the Protestant religion"; while Partridge, his companion on the road, is a secret and deluded Jacobite who has been assured by a Roman priest that "Prince Charles is as good a Protestant as any in England." Though Partridge is ready, out of friendship to Jones, to risk his life with him on the battlefield in defence of the House of Hanover, he cannot be persuaded to join in a health to King George; the barber will fight against his own cause but not drink against it. Thus, while Fielding was writing "Tom Jones," all the events of 1745 as related in "The True Patriot" were fresh in his memory.

Many, too, are the correspondences in thought and sentiment between "Tom Jones" and "The Jacobite's Journal," which indicate nearly if not quite simultaneous composition. Into the novel Fielding carries over his gibes at the newspapers and the reptile critics, his denunciation of the slander and scurrility aimed at him; and alludes to the political questions which divided parties in 1747-1748. The character of Blifil, for instance, illustrates all that he was saying in "The Jacobite's Journal" on the art of prevarication whereby truth is twisted into falsehood by clever suppressions and the adroit turn of phrases. It is

the art, said Fielding, of conveying "a lie in the words of truth." In several issues of his newspaper, the editor advocated a plan for providing for the widows and children of the clergy, based upon an essay by Humphrey Prideaux, the Dean of Norwich. It was a subject that greatly interested Fielding at that time; and in the characters of Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Honour, and Mrs. Partridge, he would represent, going so far as to add a footnote, the distress or disaster that overtakes the wives and orphans of the poor clergy who are unable to make a decent provision for their families. Of these three women, one is reduced to letting rooms to lodgers and would have starved but for the assistance of Allworthy; another becomes a waiting-maid in a squire's household; and the third marries a poor schoolmaster and dies in poverty. Finally, there is Squire Western, who surely has a cousin in the Humphry Gubbins that sent Jacobite letters to Mr. Trottplaid cast in the Somerset dialect. The portraits of Western and Partridge were resented by the Jacobites, who regarded "Tom Jones" as a political document in line with "The Jacobite's Journal." To them the novel was a challenge to renew the warfare. Having "humourized" disaffection out of the land, said "Old England" ironically, the "ingenious brain" of Mr. Fielding now proposes "to amuse and laugh us into virtue."

These considerations only fix within the limits of two or three years the composition of "Tom Jones" as a whole. It is hazardous to go a step further and attempt by the use of parallels and allusions, unsupported by external evidence, to define the month or the season when Fielding wrote each of the eighteen books into which the novel is divided. For example, in the fifth chapter of the thirteenth book he quotes in a footnote an advertisement of a pugilist dated February 1, 1747-a full year, as we shall see, before the chapter could have been written. To illustrate his