Abstract
The sense in which the phrase ‘in love’ is used is, Fielding goes on, that it is ‘applied indiscriminately to the desirable objects of all our passions, appetites, and senses’. This clearly being insufficiently precise, he then explains how ‘love’ has different effects in different circumstances:
how much soever we may be in love with an excellent surloin of beef, or bottle of Burgundy; with a damask rose, or Cremona fiddle; yet do we never smile, nor ogle, nor dress, nor flatter, nor endeavour by any other arts or tricks to gain the affection of the said beef, &c.
Mrs. Waters had in truth, not only a good opinion oour hero, But a very great affection for him. To speak out boldly at once, she was in love, according to the present universally received sense of that phrase … (Fielding, Tom Jones 9.5)1
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Notes
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones (1749) (London: Dent, 1962 ). References are to Fielding’s volume and chapter numbers.
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 ) p. 20.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 2.101.
James Thomson, The Seasons ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) ‘Spring’, pp. 580–1.
In the influential A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) John Gregory, having noted that love can improve a man, says that ‘if the fascination continue long, it will totally depress his spirit, and extinguish every active, vigorous, and manly principle of his mind. You will find this subject beautifully and pathetically painted in Thomson’s Spring.’ See Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 51.
William Hogarth, Engravings ed. with commentary by Sean Shegreen (New York: Dover, 1973) plates 51–6.
Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope ed. John Butt (Bungay: Methuen, 1968) ‘The Rape of the Lock’, 2.88.90.
Valerie Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s World ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ) p. 67.
Gillian Beer discusses this narrative extremely interestingly in ‘“Our Unnatural No-voice”: the Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic’ (1981), repr. in Leopold Damrosch (ed.), Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 379–411.
Beth Swan, Fictions of Law: An Investigation of the Law in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997 ) p. 20.
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 ( London: Virago, 1989 ) p. 7.
Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (1748) (London: Dent,1927) p. 428.
I discuss the trajectory of Roderick’s life in ‘From Tennis-Ball to Fruit Tree: Smollett’s Story of the Scottish Self’ in Writing Region and Nation ed. M. W. Thomas (Swansea: University of Wales Swansea, 1994) pp. 549–60.
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© 1999 Andrew Varney
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Varney, A. (1999). Men and Women — Love and Marriage: The Rape of the Lock, Roderick Random and Tom Jones. In: Eighteenth-Century Writers in their World. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27763-6_4
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