Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones

History remembers places as well as times, and the space of history is profoundly social rather than purely phenomenal or material. It is not produced wholly by individual psychology and yet cannot be reduced to abstract or natural space. Literary realism tends to be measured by one or the other of these extremes, as psychological realism or realism of naturalistic detail. Thus placing Fielding in the realist pantheon requires considerable exertion, if not outright violence. His scenes are starkly devoid of naturalistic detail, and he is far less concerned with accumulating the minutiae of psychological response than is his rival Richardson. But Fielding makes no claim to be a realist: his aim is to describe “not Men, but Manners.” ¹ And yet it is precisely by describing manners—by turning to the realm of the social rather than the psychological or the natural—that Fielding is able to represent historical space. In what follows, I will look at Fielding’s construction of scenes, and at the theory of history that informs his representation of manners. Ultimately, Fielding’s conception of scene—and of space—is a function of his theory of history: he rejects both the great man theory of history that relies on individual psychology, and the naturalistic detail of “mere topographers” (J, 3.1.185). For Fielding, history is best explained by the social structures and strategies that constitute manners.

I

At what is very nearly the precise textual center of The History of Tom Jones (Book 9, chap. 2), Jones and the Man of the Hill view the prospect from “Mazard-Hill,” a fictitious peak of the Malverns. Rather than admiring “one of the most noble prospects in the World”—which Fielding coyly declines to describe—Jones is instead “endeavouring to trace out [his] own Journey hither.” ² By omitting a description, Fielding foregrounds the responses of Jones and the Man of the Hill to the prospect. The Man of the Hill, who has seen the “wondrous Variety of Prospects” in Europe and its “Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Insects, and Vegetables” (T, 8.15.481), but almost nothing of its cultures and people, is interested only in the prospect itself, and indeed will shortly show his indifference to the screams of Mrs. Waters. Jones, on the other hand, invests the prospect with personal meaning by reading his own history in the landscape and measuring his distance from Sophia. By responding instantly to Mrs. Waters’s screams, he gives priority to social space over natural or psychological space, whereas the Man of the Hill, though armed with a gun, observes the struggle with the dispassionate interest of a natural historian. What becomes clear is that while the two share a physical location, and, to a considerable extent, occupy similar social positions, they inhabit wholly different kinds of space.

The prospect from Mazard-Hill merges three kinds of history: the novel itself as a history; Jones’s personal history; and, through the Man of the Hill’s recital of his part in Monmouth’s rebellion, the history of the Stuarts leading to the 1745 rebellion. ³ It is a particularly revealing example of Fielding’s representation of space. Despite the “noble prospect,” the scene follows his typical construction—it is short on description, contains only significant characters, and is shaped primarily by the attitudes and actions of those characters. Such a scenic economy is by no means unique to Fielding—the very solid walls of Clarissa’s rooms are not shaped by the density of Richardson’s descriptions, but by Clarissa’s fears, by the oppression of Lovelace and her parents, and by the very limited possibilities for free action possessed by a minor female. What is unique to Fielding is his play with the possibilities of representing space through his own self-conscious theatricality. For example, he opens the prospect scene with a parody of heroic landscape description:

Aurora now first opened her Casement, anglicè, the Day began to break, when Jones walked forth in Company with the Stranger, and mounted Mazard-Hill; of which they had no sooner gained...