Concerning Ham, Humanity, & Henry Fielding

When not editing an illustrious magazine, defining agenbites , or unraveling true-crime plots (cf. forthcoming FT), Joseph Bottum has been taking me through the history of the English novel. Pilgrim’s Progress (1676), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Pamela (1740), so far—from the slough of despond to the garden of seduction. I must admit I gave up after fifty pages of Richardson’s Pamela , which struck me as drugstore romance baptized as a chastity catechism in want of a ruthless editor.

Now it’s on to Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones , with its archaically ironic (or ironically archaic?) narrator, its Allworthy magistrate, and its not-so-worthy foundling. The chapter headings alone are delightfully wry: “Containing such grave Matter, the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter,” “A Domestic Government founded upon Rules directly contrary to those of Aristotle”—immediately followed, go figure, by “One of the Most bloody Battles ever recorded in domestic History”—and, my favorite, “With some proper Animadversions on Bastards.” You might start to guess the storyline.

More to be said on that, but I’d like to go back to the beginning, where Fielding proposes his ” Bill of Fare “—with a bit of advice to authors and readers alike:

The provision which we have here made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops.

Two and a half centuries later, appreciation of both ham and humanity is still in short supply.