Journeys from this World to the Next: The Providential Promise in Clarissa and Tom Jones

Abstract

Despite at least one recent attempt to discover substantive similarities the novels of Richardson and Fielding,' Dr. Johnson's initial impulse to discriminate still seems essential. There is all the difference in the asserted Johnson, between characters of nature and characters of manners, and there is the difference the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson. Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood by a more superficial observation than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.2 As usual, beneath the prejudicial language, Johnson strikes the kernel of truth, but what he does not consider is that character is not required to bear the same burden in the novels of Fielding as in those of Richardson, or that the observation of superficials may yield an entirely different kind of truth from what scrutiny of the heart discloses. Prior to considerations of taste there must be delineation of design, for only through a definition of the intended provinces of the two novelists will their relationship be clarified. Clarissa and Tom Jones, the two colossal pillars of eighteenth-century fiction, are the mature expressions of their authors' imaginations; the profound dissimilarities these two Augustan novels reveal differences not in talent but in didactic conceptions of art and the world. Both Clarissa and Tom Jones are fictional expressions of the Christian epic. This pattern, based on the design of providence with its attendant promise of reward, is necessarily fictionalized as romance. What is at issue, then, is not the outcome of the plot, but the way of conceptualizing and expressing the relationship the absolute world, from which the guarantee proceeds, and the temporal world, in which the promise must be earned. Whereas Clarissa's reunion with her Father occurs only in an absolute context and necessitates exile from her fallen family, Tom's acquisition