Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: An Index by Susan Price Karpuk (review)

128 rassing shattered nose, is better than the second, which Fielding carefully revised , because it is more provoking, more challenging. Bertrand Goldgar’s ‘‘Fielding’s Periodical Journalism’’ celebrates The Covent Garden Journal, which Mr. Goldgar has edited authoritatively and insightfully , and dismisses the political periodicals that preceded it. The True Patriot , rather than building Whig consensus during the ‘45, was ‘‘ineffective’’; The Jacobite’s Journal only brought Fielding ‘‘distress.’’ Jane Spencer’s ‘‘Fielding and Female Authority’’ places Fielding during a time when, as Samuel Johnson convincingly argued, ‘‘female cultural power was visible, highly contested, and especially associated with both the theatre and the novel.’’ She perceptively describes Fielding’s ‘‘mixture of responses to female authority,’’ Kitty Clive, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox won authority through their talents; theirs were achievements Fielding acknowledged and honored. He wrote for Clive, even as he deferred to his first patron, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In Ms. Spencer ’s innovative account, the Augustan Ideal is not under stress so much as any easy dismissal of Fielding as a misogynist . Mr. Rawson’s ‘‘Fielding’s Style’’ summarizes the Companion. Fielding practices the ‘‘couplet style’’ of Pope and the prose satire of Swift but in a later, different time, thus coming to a ‘‘stylistic impasse.’’ His language and his syntax seek ‘‘some normative ideal of symmetry and harmonious balance,’’ but his subject matter inevitably violates that ideal. Mr. Rawson’s central, most compelling example, as she was thirty years ago, is Amelia’s Newgate prostitute , blear-eyed Moll. Mr. Rawson catalogues Pope-like ‘‘paired arrangements ’’ in Fielding’s prose, but only to claim that they ‘‘self-consciously evok[e] the patterns they contravene.’’ In the valedictory ‘‘Fielding’s Afterlife ,’’ Charles A. Knight returns to the standard Johnsonian characterization of Fielding’s narrator, the characterization Mr. Baines enforces in his essay on Joseph Andrews, all the better to place it under stress. ‘‘As Claude Rawson has suggested,’’ Fielding, according to Mr. Knight, ‘‘achieves considerable importance as a model for Bertolt Brecht.’’ One might wonder how this squares with Keymer’s linking of Fielding with modern theater of the absurd, but the distinction between Brecht and, say, Ionesco matters little to the authors of this Companion. To alter Lennon and McCartney, ‘‘All you need is stress.’’ The Companion’s authors, including Mr. Rawson himself, are uniformly deferential to Rawson’s earlier work. That means this Companion has almost nothing to say about Fielding as a moralist, as a successful political writer (his journals won him important patrons), as a magistrate to whom some historians attribute the founding of the London police , as a writer who organized his narratives so deftly that influential critics have described them as ‘‘Palladian.’’ Ms. Spencer provides the lone surprise. In her emphasizing Fielding’s uncertainties about women and his working both for and with them, she shows him anticipating a modern, although not necessarily Brechtian or absurdist, sensibility . Brian McCrea University of Florida SUSAN PRICE KARPUK. Henry Fielding ’s Tom Jones: An Index. Brooklyn, 129 NY: AMS Press, 2006. Pp. xii ⫹ 328. $147.50. This book reflects both editorial diligence and critical naı̈veté. It thoroughly indexes Tom Jones. A scholar interested , say, in Lawyer Dowling’s appearances will find them summarized, albeit a bit confusingly, with subheadings for ‘‘business with,’’ ‘‘correspondence,’’ ‘‘drinking,’’ ‘‘eating,’’ ‘‘gentleman,’’ ‘‘identity,’’ ‘‘travel,’’ and ‘‘visits to.’’The Index is longer than it might have been because it frequently resorts to ‘‘double posting’’: horses and hawks appear as main headings as well as under animals; minor unnamed characters appear under their job description (‘‘ostler’’) as well as under their locale; individuals included in ‘‘models for characters’’ also receive a separate listing. Sheridan Baker ’s revised (1995) Norton Critical Edition is the basis for Ms. Karpuk’s Index , and she includes Baker’s notes. This leads to occasionally distracting entries. How can Fielding make a ‘‘literary reference’’ to Boswell’s Life of Johnson? Ms. Karpuk’s introductory section, ‘‘Structure and Use of the Index,’’ asserts : ‘‘because the Index catalogues every detail that appears in the book, it lends itself to the development of multiple readings of specific themes and ideas without arguing itself for any preferred theme or critical school of thought...