History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Chapter iv. – Chapter ix.

This section of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, set against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite rising, resolves mid-plot conflicts at the Upton inn, expands core character backstories, advances the central romantic plot between Tom Jones and Sophia Western, and includes Fielding’s direct meta-fictional commentary on narrative craft and reader interpretation.

The section opens with the unexpected arrival of a serjeant and file of musqueteers escorting a deserter, an event that ends the brawling hostilities consuming the inn’s guests and staff. The serjeant recognizes the distressed, disguised woman Jones had rescued earlier as Mrs Waters, wife of Captain Waters of the regiment that holds Ensign Northerton (the man Jones previously imprisoned for murder) captive. The inn’s landlady, who had mistreated Mrs Waters for her shabby appearance, begs forgiveness, and Jones mediates a full reconciliation between the feuding landlady, landlord, Jones’s loyal tutor Partridge, and the heroic chambermaid Susan, who had beaten Partridge in an earlier fight. The group holds a ceremonial libation, officiated by the serjeant who claims the custom dates to ancient peace treaties, before sharing a communal meal that restores general good cheer. Fielding follows this with a playful digression defending Jones’s hearty three-pound meat meal, noting that even great heroes are subject to mortal bodily needs, and the meal explains his temporary inattention to Mrs Waters’s amorous advances before he succumbs to her flirtations after dinner. The section then shifts to a direct address to readers, with Fielding issuing explicit instructions to avoid misinterpreting the text as prior careless editors have done: he cautions readers not to dismiss seemingly irrelevant plot incidents as extraneous before seeing the full narrative arc, not to conflate similar minor characters across the work as unoriginal, and not to judge characters as wholly good or evil, as flawed, morally mixed figures are more realistic and morally instructive for readers than unrealistic paragons or villains.

The central plot advances as Sophia Western and her loyal maid Mrs Honour arrive at the Upton inn, having fled Sophia’s home to avoid being forced into a marriage with the duplicitous Mr Blifil by her hot-headed father Squire Western. Sophia, who believes Jones has abandoned her for a military career, is eager to reunite with him, but is devastated when the still-intoxicated Partridge lies to Mrs Honour that Jones is in bed with a prostitute. Sophia interrogates the chambermaid Susan, who confirms Jones is sharing a bed with another woman, and learns the inn staff have spread malicious rumors framing her and Honour as loose women fleeing their families. Heartbroken and humiliated, Sophia leaves a muff emblazoned with her name in Jones’s empty bed as a parting gesture, pays her bill, and departs with Honour, resolved to travel to London to escape her father’s control. Fielding uses these events to highlight the gendered double standards of 18th-century society, where a woman’s reputation can be destroyed by unsubstantiated rumors, and the consequences of miscommunication between lovers.

Chapter vii provides critical backstory for Mrs Waters: she was Captain Waters’s common-law wife, who had an affair with Ensign Northerton. When Northerton learned he faced execution for killing a man in a duel, he convinced Mrs Waters to run away with him to escape, but midway through their journey, he attempted to assault and rob her of her £90 in banknotes and diamond ring, the attack Jones had interrupted. Fielding explicitly cautions readers against generalizing about the army officer corps based on Northerton’s villainy, noting he was uneducated, ungentlemanly, and unrepresentative of the wider rank and file of British officers.

The next phase of the section follows chaotic encounters tied to runaway spouses at the inn. An Irish gentleman, Mr Fitzpatrick, arrives posthaste searching for his wife, who fled his abusive, jealous treatment five years earlier. He bursts into Mrs Waters’s chamber by mistake, finds Jones in bed with her, and assumes Jones has cuckolded him, attacking Jones before his friend Mr Maclachlan arrives to confirm Mrs Waters is not Fitzpatrick’s wife. Humiliated, Fitzpatrick threatens to duel Jones in the morning, then agrees to travel to Bath with Maclachlan to search for his wife. Later, Fitzpatrick’s wife—Mrs Fitzpatrick, Sophia’s cousin, who was raised by Sophia’s aunt Mrs Western—also flees the inn when she learns her husband is nearby, joining Sophia on her journey. The group also meets Abigail, Mrs Fitzpatrick’s rude, disdainful waiting-woman, who insults the inn staff and accidentally learns from Partridge that Jones is the heir of the wealthy Squire Allworthy, a fact that shocks her, as she knows Allworthy has no legitimate son.

Tension escalates when Squire Western arrives at the inn, having tracked Sophia from their family estate after she fled her forced betrothal to Blifil the night prior (a sequence detailed in the section’s retrospective chapters, which explain Western celebrated his perceived victory over Sophia’s resistance by getting drunk with his staff, allowing her to escape undetected at midnight). Western sees Jones holding Sophia’s abandoned muff, assumes Jones has kidnapped his daughter, and attacks him. Fitzpatrick, hoping to win Western’s favor as his nephew-in-law, lies that he saw Jones in bed with Sophia. Western, Fitzpatrick, and the local parson Parson Supple storm Mrs Waters’s chamber, find her alone, and realize their mistake. Western then attempts to have Jones arrested for stealing the muff, but the chambermaid Susan testifies that Sophia left the muff in Jones’s bed herself, forcing the local justice to acquit Jones. Western storms off to continue his search for Sophia, while Jones, realizing Sophia was at the inn and has fled, immediately sets off after her, vowing eternal fidelity to her and refusing even to say goodbye to Mrs Waters, who leaves for Bath with Fitzpatrick and Maclachlan, reconciling with Fitzpatrick as he consoles her for the loss of her stolen ring. The section closes by noting locals still refer to Sophia as the “Somersetshire angel” for her beauty and kindness, before tracing Sophia’s journey: after fleeing her home, she initially planned to travel to London, but changed course to Bristol after learning from a post-boy that Jones had traveled that way, then traced his path to Upton inn, exhausted from her journey, just as Western arrived to track her down, setting up the conflicts of Book XI.