History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Chapter xiii. – Chapter xi.

The section opens with a perilous hunting accident that nearly costs Sophia Western her life and decisively alters the emotional landscape of the novel. Mr Western, increasingly devoted to his daughter, contrives to have her ride to hounds with him. On the second day of the hunt, as Sophia returns near her father’s house, her spirited horse begins to prance and caper so violently that she is in imminent danger of being thrown. Tom Jones, riding behind, gallops up, leaps from his own horse, and seizes the bridle; but the animal rears, throws Sophia from its back, and Jones catches her in his arms. The encounter leaves him with a broken arm, an injury he dismisses as a trifle compared to her escape. Sophia, trembling and pale, is described as giving Jones a look so charged with tenderness that it betrays a passion stronger than mere gratitude. Western, alarmed at the missing rider but overjoyed to find his daughter unharmed, callously remarks that broken arms can be mended like timber. The narrator then digresses into a learned inquiry into why women admire male bravery, citing Aristotle on the differing nature of fortitude in the sexes, Pierre Bayle on women’s love of glory, and even Homer’s Penelope as evidence that admiration of heroic virtue is natural rather than a sign of cowardice. The accident, the narrator confesses, had by this time already begun to work on the heart of both Jones and Sophia.

In Chapter xiv the surgeon is summoned. Western, attributing Sophia’s pallor to her fall, insists she be blooded; she submits out of filial obedience while privately doubting the necessity. Jones, having his bone set under Western’s roof, is sentenced to water-gruel and confined to bed. Mrs Honour visits her mistress during the operation and, gazing at her own reflection rather than her lady, lavishly praises Jones’s beauty, his white skin, and his “magnanimity.” Sophia, perceiving the maid’s meaning through a convenient looking-glass, finally checks the torrent by reminding Honour that Jones is her father’s friend and that the Seagrim girl must never be mentioned. Honour, fearing she has overstepped, persists with a far more dangerous revelation: Jones had once kissed Sophia’s muff while it lay in her hands, calling it “the prettiest muff in the world” and declaring no one could see anything beautiful in the presence of Sophia herself. He had also sighed over Sophia’s harpsichord playing, exclaiming how happy the man who possessed her would be, and sworn he worshipped her as a goddess. Sophia, struggling to command her colour, extracts a promise of secrecy from Honour and signals her continued favour by withdrawing the warning she had previously given the maid.

Book V opens with a discursive essay justifying the interspersed “serious” chapters. Fielding argues that true genius works by contrast; he mocks critics who mistake accidentals for essentials, praises the English Pantomime for pairing dull gods with harlequin, and contends that solemn passages are deliberately woven in to heighten the comic. Chapter ii then catalogues the visitors to Jones’s sickroom. Allworthy offers tender advice; Thwackum denounces the broken limb as a divine judgment for sin; Square, drawing on Cicero’s Tusculans and Lord Shaftesbury, treats the accident as philosophically trivial, until a rapturous speech causes him to bite his own tongue, an event Thwackum gleefully interprets as heaven’s rebuke. Blifil visits rarely and never alone, lest he contaminate his sobriety. Western, for his part, tries to force beer on the patient and serenades him each hunting morning with his horn, but compensates by bringing Sophia to play the harpsichord, where Jones soon observes the involuntary tokens of her affection in blushes, trembling, and faltering speech.

In Chapter iii Jones’s agitation produces a violent internal conflict. He counts the obstacles to pursuing Sophia: Western’s determination to marry her only to the richest men in the county, the ingratitude of betraying his host, Allworthy’s horror at any base conduct, and above all the plight of poor Molly Seagrim, whose ruin and possible prostitution he foresees if he deserts her. He resolves to cleave to Molly and expel Sophia from his thoughts, but a “trifling accident” the following evening undoes the resolution. Chapter iv reveals the incident: Mrs Honour, visiting Jones, explains that Sophia had secretly sent her to succour Molly and then asked for the very muff back from Honour, having quarrelled with a new one. That evening Sophia wears the muff while playing; when it slips from her fingers Western snatches it and casts it into the fire, and Sophia springs up with extraordinary eagerness to rescue it from the flames. Fielding pauses to insist that trifling circumstances often produce momentous events, comparing the muff’s conquest of Jones to the fall of Troy before “false tears and fawning words.”

Chapter v finds Jones walking out one day to break off with Molly, only to find her mother denying her whereabouts, and her spiteful elder sister Betty directing him upstairs. When Molly’s door is at last opened and he attempts to discuss separation, the rug screening Molly’s clothes falls away, disclosing the philosopher Square in a posture of ridiculous confinement, wearing Molly’s nightcap. Fielding explains that Square had watched Molly at church and, learning she was already fallen, had used Jones’s confinement to supplant him, partly through presents. Jones, far from enraged, laughs, embraces Square, and exacts a promise of secrecy, leaving Square to reconcile himself with Molly through caresses and cash.

Chapter vi completes the disentangling from Molly: Betty informs Jones that one Will Barnes had been Molly’s original seducer and likely father of her child, a claim Molly herself eventually confirms. Jones’s heart, now “entirely evacuated,” is wholly possessed by Sophia, but his honour forbids a clandestine pursuit that would ruin Western’s hopes and wound Allworthy. The torment is visible in his pallor, his faltering tongue, and his trembling whenever Sophia approaches. Matters come to a crisis in the garden, beside the canal where Jones had once retrieved Sophia’s bird. They meet almost by accident, exchange cautious remarks about the morning and the place, and gradually confess their passion in trembling, half-spoken phrases; Jones catches her as she feels faint, escorts her to the house, and Sophia retires to recover with the help of hartshorn and Mrs Honour.