that ‘to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in
this history’. Allworthy and Sophia accept Tom’s warm humanity. The unheroically-
named hero is honest and guileless, if not sexually innocent. He goodheartedly
forgives those who use him ill. Fielding reconciles human nature with the recom-
mendation of goodness by means of what Coleridge thought ‘one of the three great
plots of literature’.
The remarkably different Tom Jones and Clarissa were the father and mother of
the English novel. Fielding’s more interior Amelia was also more conventional, like
his rival’s Grandison.
Tobias Smollett
Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), a much-travelled Scotch surgeon based in London,
has Fielding’s robustness, but Fielding is an introvert compared with the heroically
cantankerous Smollett, whose boldly drawn caricatures of public life have the hectic
action of the animated cartoon. He translated the picaresque Le Sage and the witty
anti-romance of Cervantes; his own novels follow suit. He sketches types and
comments on social mores – on the road, in Bath or in London – with little coher-
ent story. He wrote a Complete History of Englandand much else, besides the novels
between the lively Roderick Random and the gentler Humphry Clinker, the two by
which he is best remembered.
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) refers to Smollett as Smelfungus, on account of his
fault-finding Travels through France and Italy.Ster ne was the most singular of the
four fathers of the English novel.Clarissaand Tom Jonesimprove on prototypes, but
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy seems to come from nowhere. In fact, the
nove l had several sources: the romance and the adventure, but also philosophical
tales like Swift’s Gulliver and Voltaire’s Candide,and non-realistic fictions like those
of Rabelais and Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and from non-fiction, such as Burton’s Anatomy
of Melancholy.
The Life and Opinions disappoints all conventional expectations: Sterne, amused
by fiction’s pretence of combining realism with chronology, begins his hero’s Life
with an Opinion. The book opens: ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed
both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they
were about when they begot me ...’. After further opinions, Chapter I ends:
‘Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good
G–d! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at
the same time,—Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with
such a silly question? Pray what was your father saying?—Nothing.’Some medical opinion held that the moment of conception affected the embryo.
Why did his mother ask his father, at a moment when he was not saying anything,
this particular question? Because Walter Shandy, a regular man, on the first Sunday
night of the month, ‘wound up a large house-clock, which we had standing upon
the backstairs head,with his own hands: – And being somewhere between fifty and
sixty years of age ... he had likewise gradually brought some other little family
concernments to the same period.’ Mrs Shandy’s monthly association of the ideas
THE NOVEL 203