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Tom Jones on the Telly: Fielding, the BBC, and the Sister ArtsMartin c. Battestin Some thirty years ago in an essay on the film of Fielding's Tom Jones (1963) written by John Osborne and directed by Tony Richardson, I made what remains for me the essential point about adapting novels for the screen: analogy is the key.1 Since it is impossible to duplicate in visual terms in the course of two hours (or in five, as the case may be) the substance of a novel of a thousand pages whose effects depend entirely on the written word, the makers of the film, while of course recalling the movement of the plot, must find ways of capturing the spirit of the work of fiction, of striking analogous attitudes and analogous rhetorical techniques. In the film, Osborne and Richardson—in cooperation with the set designer and costume maker, the photographer and editor, and not least with John Addison, who composed the music—succeeded in conveying a sense of Fielding's characters and comic situations. What is more, by exploiting the technical capabilities of cinematography they managed ingeniously to evoke his intrusive narrator and the verbal games he plays: though occasionally we hear the voice of the narrator, what we delight in, as readers of the novel delight in Fielding's self-conscious and deliberate artificiality, are the hero's winking at us from the screen, or hanging his hat over the camera lens to shield us from a naughty interlude; whole scenes, shot at ajerky sped-up pace, recall the zany chase sequences of silent film; and the camera is made to do its tricks with "wipes" and "freezes." In considering the problem of turning the pages of Tom Jones into pictures, it is worth remembering that Fielding himself could endorse in his fiction the Horatian concept utpicturapoësis, the ideathat poetry and painting are "sister arts"; yet he was always aware of the irreconcilable differences that separated these two antithetical genres. In the famous preface to Joseph Andrews (1742)—which, as it 1 "Osborne's Tom Jones: Adapting a Classic," Virginia Quarterly Review 42 (1966), 378-93. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 4, July 1998 502 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION happens, Tony Richardson in 1978 also adapted for the cinema, with disappointing results2—Fielding distinguished at some length between "the Comic and the Burlesque ," invoking the example of his friend Hogarth to illustrate the difference—a compliment Hogarth returned the following year when he referred purchasers of his print Characters and Caricaturas to the passage in question. In calling his friend "a Comic History-Painter," Fielding had in mind Hogarth's picturenarratives , The Harlot's Progress (1732) and The Rake's Progress (1735)—the former representing in six "frames," as it were, the story of Kate Hackabout's descent from innocence to a vile death from venereal disease; the latter, in eight frames, depicting the story of Tom Rakewell, prodigal heir to his miserly father's riches, whose indulgence in the vices of the town brings him to debtor's prison, and at last to Bedlam. In these two popular series, Fielding declared in the Champion (10 June 1740), Hogarth had shown himself to be "one of the most useful Satyrists any Age hath produced." And in the story of Mr Wilson in Joseph Andrews (3:iii-iv) he would produce his own prose version of Tom Rakewell's progress, though giving it a happy ending. Hogarth, for his part, attempted in his own way to bring the two art forms closer together by filling each picture of his "histories" with emblematic details that reveal the moral he meant to inculcate ; his pictures, as art historians have remarked, must be "read" as well as viewed. Fielding in his fictions often renders in prose popular subjects of the visual arts. Besides the Wilson story, examples from Joseph Andrews are the chapter in which the hero resists the blandishments of Lady Booby (l:v), a scene duplicating that between Joseph and Mrs Potiphar in Christian art, and the comic redaction of the parable of the Good Samaritan (l:xii), the subject also of Hogarth's painting of 1737. And once in...

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