A Partridge in the Family Tree:

Fixity, Mobility, and Community

in Tom Jones

Hilary Teynor

T he title page of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A

Foundling (1749) immediately alerts the reader to the protag-
onist’s dubious lineage: who are the foundling’s father and mother?
Consider, for example, Tom’s immediate familial and pseudo-familial
connections: he has a biological father in the clergyman’s son Summer
and a mother in Bridget Allworthy, an adoptive father in Squire All-
worthy, an initially resistant father-in-law in Squire Western, and in
loco parentis schoolmasters in Thwackum and Square. Benjamin
Partridge and Jenny Jones count as putative parents of Tom Jones,
with Blifil as both his half-brother and foster brother. Sophia Western,
on the other hand, has substitute mothers in her aunt Mrs Western
and Lady Bellaston because of her own mother’s absence. Later in the
novel, thematically important issues of paternity arise with Nightin-
gale, who is a son and a father-to-be, and his uncle, who acts as a
quasi-father. The narrative also includes Tom and Partridge’s response
to a Hamlet performance, a play that turns on father-son and fraternal
relationships. Such tangled relationships that expose the conflicts of
heredity and contractual obligations are not merely curiosities of

E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N , Volume 17, Number 3, April 2005

350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

novelistic design, but rather are key to understanding how the novel
offers a critique of existing social structures.
This article focuses on the relationship between Partridge and Tom
in order to demonstrate how the category of “father” is figured
through the analogical structure of master and servant. To investigate
this analogy, I posit Ferdinand Tönnies’s categories of Gemeinschaft
(community) and Gesellschaft (civil society) as forms of association that
illuminate the ways in which Fielding’s society manifested coexisting
features of the traditional and the modern. These terms, as I use them
in this article, exist in three forms: 1) as ideal types for definitional
purposes; 2) as repositories of norms to which people might appeal;
and 3) as empirical labels useful for describing sociological formations
within societies, which are always hybrids of the two categories.1
Gemeinschaft, with its ties based on shared space, consanguinity, fellow-
feeling, and custom, suggests a specific location, often rural, in which
relationships work. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, describes relation-
ships based on reason and utility, and tends to appear in urban
settings.2 Because these categories invite consideration of the play
between the hereditary and the contractual, and questioning of the
foundation of those very terms, they hold interpretive power for
analysing Fielding’s conceptions of familial structures.3
1 For an elaboration of these categories, see Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society,
ed. Jose Harris, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (1887; reprint, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001). For an appraisal of Tönnies’s place in sociology, see
Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). According to
Nisbet, “What Tönnies thus does is to take community from the status of dependent variable
that it had in the writings of the economists and classical individualists in general and give
it independent, even causal status. This is the essence of Tönnies’s typological use of
community. It is an essence that extended itself into the works of Durkheim, whose criticism
of Tönnies and reversal of terminology cannot conceal the cognate relation that lies between
his ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ types of solidarity and Tönnies’s concepts. The same
typological essence is to be seen in Simmel, for whom ‘metropolis’ becomes the
encapsulating term of modernism” (78). Joan Aldous reproduces Durkheim’s review of
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft , along with Tönnies’s response, in “An Exchange between
Durkheim and Tönnies on the Nature of Social Relations, with an Introduction by Joan
Aldous,” American Journal of Sociology 77:6 (May 1972), 1191–1200. See also Werner
Cahnman, Weber and Toennies: Comparative Sociology in Historical Perspective (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1995). For a convenient digest of Weber’s far-reaching thought, see
Max Weber: Sociological Writings, ed. Wolf Heydebrand (New York: Continuum, 1994).
2 Tönnies insisted that these categories always coexisted in some measure. See “My
Relationship to Sociology,” in Ferdinand Toennies: On Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical.
Selected Writings, ed. Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971), 10. On the city/country dichotomy, see Martin Battestin, The Moral
Basis of Fielding’s Art (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 91.
3 Although sociological theory has obviously broadened its scope since Tönnies, recent
sociologists, as well as historians of the British family, rely explicitly and implicitly on the
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 351

In the transitional zone of the road, we continually see the points of

contact and transformation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,
which are modified once communal relationships move beyond more
or less fixed geographic spaces. Because Tönnies’s terms describe
social structures rather than individual actions, I draw on Victor
Turner’s anthropological work on rites of passage in order to describe
the respective processes of maturation and regression in Jones and
Partridge as they hold ambiguous social status on the journey.4 The
instances of literal and figurative dislocation in Tom Jones, then,
function as spaces of possibility in two distinct ways: for Tom, the
journey is a rite of passage that ultimately educates him for his role as
Allworthy’s successor; and for Partridge, the journey is imbued with
a sense of unfolding opportunities and nostalgia for his previous
situation in life.5

theories put forward in his study. Most notably, in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England,
1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), Lawrence Stone discusses Tönnies’s
categories directly as a way of interpreting his own theories of social change (660). Naomi
Tadmor’s even more recent study, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household,
Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), compares the lineage
family with the household family (with the household including servants), and her terms
implicitly recall the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction: “the contractual, instrumental, occupa-
tional nature of the household-family relationships should not be taken to mean that ties of
blood and marriage were of little significance” (29). Alan Macfarlane refers to Tönnies not
only in his review of Stone’s book but also in his Origins of English Individualism (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), where he acknowledges Tönnies as a “major thinker” (8).
4 For Turner, the feature of the rite of passage called communitas is a liminal, temporary location
of possibility for empathy and equality, which applies to Tom Jones because Tom and Partridge
become “liminal personae,” who, Turner would assert, “are necessarily ambiguous since ...
these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states
and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt
and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 95.
Although Turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas arise in relation to the pilgrimage,
I apply them to a primarily secular version of a rite of passage, referring both to states of being
and sociotemporal locations. Wolfram Schmidgen uses Turner’s notion of liminality to
describe the social position of the bastard. Schmidgen, “Illegitimacy and Social Observation:
The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” ELH 69:1 (2002), 140.
5 See Ronald Paulson, “The Pilgrimage and the Family: Structures in the Novels of Fielding
and Smollett,” Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Studies Presented to Louis M. Knapp, ed. George
Rousseau and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 57–58. Paulson
informs us that the partridge is “a bird noted for hatching other birds’ eggs” (73). Although
Paulson cites T.H. White’s The Bestiary (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1960) in his footnote
for this information, we might refer to the Bible as well: “As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and
hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst
of his days, and at his end shall be a fool" (Jeremiah 17:11). This verse not only suggests the
issue of false fatherhood, but also the false ownership of wealth, two issues that are united
in Tom Jones. Blifil's envy of Tom leads him to withhold the foundling's birth secret, afraid
that Tom could displace him as inheritor of the Allworthy estate. Notwithstanding the legal
352 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Considering Tom and Partridge specifically as temporary masters

and servants exposes the clash in the law between individual volition
and freedom in the “lower orders” and paternalistic authority. Insofar
as Tönnies’s categories rely on concepts of the will to describe com-
munity ties, they are germane to current debates about the persist-
ence of traditional modes of association in eighteenth-century legal
contracts.6 Tönnies’s psychological apparatus of volition in his cate-
gories facilitates discussion about the tension between pre-existing
moral obligations and rational choices in eighteenth-century law that
.7
P.S. Atiyah so cogently details in The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract
Atiyah reveals a conservative tendency in eighteenth-century law that
arises throughout Tom Jones, especially in Tom and Partridge’s
relationship—the idea that one’s actions and identity are determined
by one’s status, and that any agreements or contracts are merely evi-
dentiary to the expected fulfilment of the pre-existing obligation. The
master-servant element to Tom and Partridge’s relationship reveals a
particularly problematic subsumption of one’s will to another’s in the
form of paternalism.8 Because neither Partridge nor Tom has real
problems surrounding Tom's inheritance as a bastard—Homer O. Brown discusses this in
“Tom Jones: The ‘Bastard’ of History,” Boundary 2 7:2 (Winter 1979)—at the end of the
novel, Methodist convert Blifil is shown to be the false and foolish owner of riches that leave
him in “the midst of his days.” The previous verse in Jeremiah, "I the LORD search the heart,
I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his
doings” (Jeremiah 17:10), is relevant to the trials of Jones and Partridge on the road, and
their consequent rewards.
6 Concerning Gemeinschaft exclusively, Tönnies argues that “The aggregate of determinate will
which governs a community, and which is as natural as language itself and contains a
multitude of understandings regulated by its norms, I shall call concord or family spirit (the
term concordia implies a heartfelt sense of integration and unanimity). Mutual understanding
and concord are one and the same thing: namely the will of the community in its most basic
forms. Understanding operates in the relations between individuals, concord is the strength
and character of the whole ” (Community and Civil Society , 34). Furthermore, Tönnies analyses
Henry Sumner Maine’s famous catch-phrase in Ancient Law , “from status to contract,” in
order to suggest that “Control under family law is essentially the control of the whole over
its parts. It is the control of one part of the family over other parts, e.g. of the father and
master of the household over sons and servants, but only because that one part is the visible
embodiment of the invisible whole ... . In Society, by contrast, control, like property, belongs
a priori to the individual person” (Community and Civil Society, 193). See Maine, Ancient Law,
intro. Dante Scala (1866; reprint, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 170.
7 P.S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See C.
M. Gray’s review of Atiyah’s book in Yale Law Journal 90 (November 1980), 216–31. For two
shorter reviews, see C. Turpin, Cambridge Law Journal 39 (November 1980), 396–97 and
C. Fried, Harvard Law Review 93 (June 1980), 1858–68.
8 Historian Bridget Hill suggests a “paternalism-to-contract” development in master-servant
relations over the course of the century in Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth-Century
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 6. For some excellent discussions of Fielding’s servant
characters informed by E.P. Thompson’s theories of the rise of the working class, see John
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 353

paternal authority, both must rely on a once-removed approximation

of it during their journey, which inevitably reveals problems in the
conception of custom, status, and paternal authority as natural and
therefore normative.
Partridge and Tom’s relationship opens the fullest, most nuanced
understanding of family in Tom Jones. This article considers Tom and
Partridge as household members without a house, as masters and
servants without written contracts, in order to expand on Homer O.
Brown’s observation that “misrepresentation and misattribution
operate as narrative cause in Tom Jones.”9 The confusion surrounding
paternity in this pair causes us to question not only, as Brown suggests,
larger genealogical narratives in history, but also the very meaning of
familial metaphors. The complexities of the household—a hybrid
entity that includes non-kinship members—complicate these meta-
phors of cultural inheritance. Furthermore, Fielding’s abiding con-
cern with the Stuart succession suggests a political context behind the
biological father-son relationships, where one also notices that the
Old and Young Pretenders are household members without proper
houses and wanderers much like Tom and Partridge. Partridge fre-
quently expresses his affinity with the Pretenders in his Jacobite
support for James II’s hereditary claims to the throne. Recall, more-
over, that The Man of the Hill fought for Charles II’s bastard son the
Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II, thus alluding to
problems of paternity with the claimants to the throne and suggesting
that the ambiguity of contract between Tom and Partridge operates
on the level of the British Constitution.10

The seemingly fixed roles of Allworthy’s community give it the

appearance of a large extended family emanating from the epicentre
of Paradise Hall, a family from which Partridge and Tom are expelled.
Partridge’s nostalgic longing for this community—for father-figure

Richetti, “Class Struggle without Class: Novelists and Magistrates,” The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation 32:3 (1991), 203–18, and Richetti, “Representing an Underclass:
Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett,” The New Eighteenth Century , ed. Felicity
Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Routledge, 1987), 84–98.
9 Brown, 225.
10 Atiyah discusses James II’s exclusion in terms of the traditional definition of contract: “the
oath is the monarch’s acknowledgement that there are indeed duties binding upon him which
arise out of the relationship. It is evidence of those duties, if it does not create them” (38).
354 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Allworthy—compels him to employ particularly self-serving and non-

familial strategies to inhabit his “natural” role within it. During the
pivotal episode at the Upton inn, a location that blurs status
distinctions in its mix of patrons, a sergeant staying there asks
Partridge, “whither he and his Master were travelling.” Partridge
replies, “None of your Magisters ... I am no Man’s Servant, I assure
you; for tho’ I have had Misfortunes in the World, I write Gentleman
after my Name; and as poor and simple as I may appear now, have
taught Grammar School in my Time. Sed hei mihi non sum quod fui”
(But woe to me! I am not what I was).11 Partridge earlier insists on
accompanying Tom as his servant throughout his journey, so that this
emphatic denial of Tom’s authority appears as tergiversation from his
previous pledge of service. Given that Magister was a common title for
a schoolmaster, Partridge also appears to deny his intellectual inferior-
ity to Tom as well. Throughout the second half of the book, Partridge
vacillates between such expressions of devotion and denial in his
association with Tom, depending on the situation and the audience—
as I have suggested, such confusion is symptomatic of a larger opposi-
tional play between many types of fixity and mobility in Tom Jones.
For Partridge, the secular calling of country schoolmaster is en-
dowed with an a priori set of expectations and duties. In his wandering
state, however—an extended threshold period—roles are flexible
when they are not solidified in the context of a community with its
own matrix of obligations. Tom, alternatively, is bred a gentleman
aware of his bastardy, and thus starts the novel from a secure yet

11 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling , ed. Fredson Bowers, intro. Martin
Battestin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 515. References are to this edition.
Partridge’s use of the word “Gentleman” in his signature suggests that his justification is
based on a mastery of both written and spoken language. Fielding is perhaps evoking the
works of Nathan Bailey, author of An Universal Etymological Dictionary, whose entry on
“gentleman” denounces the very looseness of Partridge’s usage of the term: “A Person of
good or honourable Extraction. ‘Jack will never make a Gentleman.’ This Proverb teaches,
that every one will not make a Gentleman, that is vulgarly called so, now a-days; there is more
than the bare Name required, to the making him what he ought to be by Birth, Honour, and
Merit ... for put him into what Circumstances you please, he will discover himself at one Time
or other in Point of Behaviour, to be of a mean Extract, Awkward, Ungenteel and
Ungenerous” (1721; reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), Aaa4v.
In Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968),
Glenn W. Hatfield discusses Fielding’s own preoccupation with the misuse of words. Drawing
parallels with John Locke’s discussion of the abuse of words in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Hatfield identifies the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the act of
naming or labelling. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), book 3, esp. chap. 9, “Of the Imperfection of
Words,” and chap. 10, “Of the Abuse of Words” (475–508).
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 355

mixed status position. Upon his expulsion from Paradise Hall, part of
Tom’s quest is to find a place for himself, so he thus improvises differ-
ent models of deference and authority. During Tom and Partridge’s
journey, their relationship modulates between various roles in an
extended familial structure: at the same time that Partridge is the
putative father of Tom’s past and a proxy for Allworthy’s fatherly care,
Tom is master over the schoolmaster-cum-servant and a proxy for
Allworthy’s masterly authority. Tom and Partridge are significant as
characters outside of these familial structures as well, where the
mobility and ambiguity of these structures are mirrored by a like trans-
formation in character and society in the course of their journey. This
transition could be said to dramatize the potential for social change
even as traditional roles persist.
The Latin quotation tacked onto Partridge’s denial of Tom’s
authority at the Upton inn—“But alas! I am not what I was”—reminds
the reader that he held a former career as schoolmaster in Allworthy’s
community. He even had Jenny Jones as his own servant, his accused
paramour, and his superior in her understanding of Latin. Yet this
career has crumbled, and a succession of odd jobs has taken its place.
When he appears, for the first time after Allworthy’s banishment, for
instance, he is a soi-disant barber and surgeon, and later we learn that
he also tailors clothing. Partridge and Tom experience a horizontal
mode of association when they first meet: Tom has just been hit on
the head with a bottle in a fight with Ensign Northerton over the
reputation of his absent love Sophia, and Partridge tends his wounds.
Tom’s initial reaction to Partridge is not based on any kind of status-
based judgment, and he is delighted with the man’s sense of humour
and eccentricities (415).12
During Partridge’s over-extended, inverted rite of passage, in which
he is thrown into the world after a miserable marriage and brief
career, he seems not to have ever lived up to his supposed calling; in
other words, he repeatedly fails to perform the actions that would
reaffirm his a priori notions of himself. In Partridge’s mind, his school-
master position is just that: a state of being that “was,” according to his
Latin tag. The very name “schoolmaster” implies knowledge and
control over subject matter and impressionable young minds, yet
12 According to Tönnies, “Status does not simply presuppose the existence of individuals, but
exists in them and together with them” (Community and Civil Society, 204). For a different,
though complementary, view of status, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols., ed.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 2:932.
356 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Partridge never quite manages to demonstrate that he is master over

his subject or anything else.
Although Partridge’s service to Tom appears to be one of these odd
jobs, a gesellschaftlich way of simply making money, the surrogate father
relationships introduce a gemeinschaftlich form of association as well.
Partridge steps into the void of Tom’s unknown parentage— yet, as
the novel keeps insisting, “father,” like “gentleman,” is only a label.
Tom considers the former schoolmaster to be his absent father for
most of his life, without ever even seeing him.13 But these absent
presences stand as metaphors for evacuated status roles as well as a
reminder of the need for surrogates or proxies when biological rela-
tionships fail to materialize. Tom’s uncertain assumption of masterly
responsibilities over Partridge, for example, fills the void that
Allworthy has left as paternalist in Partridge’s life, calling into ques-
tion the foundation of obligations within the original Gemeinschaft.
Partridge’s claim that he is “not what he was” links his ontological
dislocation with his geographical dislocation from the school near
Allworthy’s land.
More urgent perhaps than Partridge’s regressive nostalgia for
Allworthy is the notion that his character stands also as a symbol of
the crisis of authority brought about by the Jacobite rebellions of 1715
and 1745.14 Because Partridge’s Jacobitism is an integral part of his
character as Fielding imagines him, and one that addresses issues of
the family and traditional systems of power, his symbolic function
seems even more plausible. Because the monarch was viewed as a

13 John Allen Stevenson discusses the contexts of Jacobitism in the Hamlet scene later in the
novel and calls attention to such absent presences, specifically concerning Partridge’s super-
stition. Stevenson, “Fielding's Mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge, and the ’45,” Studies in English
Literature 37:3 (1997), 553–71. In the course of his argument about the image of the ghost
in Hamlet holding political significance for Partridge’s character, Stevenson interestingly
refers to Partridge as Jones’s “servant” and “friend,” an instance of relatively common seman-
tic ambivalence towards Partridge’s character (564; 567). See also Paulson, who refers to
Partridge as a “scheming servant” as well (73). The narrator of Tom Jones concedes a good
deal of authority to the reader in deciding how to categorize Partridge. When Tom comes
to blows with the proprietors of the Upton inn after their assaults on the honour of “Mrs.
Waters,” the narrator describes Partridge’s rescue thus: “seeing the Danger which threatened
his Master, or Companion, (which you chuse to call him) prevented so sad a Catastrophe”
(502). Later, the narrator echoes Partridge’s own language: Partridge calls Tom his friend,
and the narrator applies the same language to Partridge. In that very episode at the inn,
however, the narrator unambiguously states, after Tom has discovered the muff, “it will be
necessary to recur what had there happened since Partridge had first left it on his Master’s
Summons” (548).
14 See Stevenson’s discussion of Fielding’s portrayal of Jacobitism in “Tom Jones and the
Stuarts” ELH 61:3 (1994), 571–95.
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 357

patriarch of the nation, Jacobites, Partridge included, justified their

position by claiming that the right of succession is analogous to the
right of primogeniture practised by most English landowners.15 Both
systems of inheritance are based on hereditary relations; but just as
the monarch was a father to his people, he was also bound to serve
them, and any anti-Jacobite would argue that James II was a bad father
and a bad servant to the nation because he apparently failed to
uphold his monarchical oath. Throughout Tom Jones Fielding ques-
tions certain tradition-based societies—the “gypsies” included—to
suggest the poverty of purely customary modes of association.16
Although Jacobites and gypsies are groups with a strong Gemeinschaft
in their commitment to custom, and a sense of honour-based shame
that Fielding finds lacking in English society, they are liminal and
associated with foreignness: the gypsies trace their roots to Egypt, and
the Jacobites are aligned with Roman Catholicism.
The importance of religion in Tom Jones is evident, but despite
Paradise Hall’s name and the abiding concern with providence in the
novel, Tom’s bildung is primarily a wordly, secular one. The taverns,
inns, and stretches of road allow Tom locations of possibility to ex-
plore different modes of association from those determined by his
gentleman-bastard status at Allworthy’s. The profusion of people with
mistaken identities on the road and at the inns further creates oppor-
tunities for Tom to develop his judgment. The occasional esprit de corps
that arises between Tom and Partridge dramatizes the blurring of
status boundaries and resembles Turner’s sense of communitas in their
sometimes horizontally defined relationship.17 In Tom’s process of
15 See Fielding, Tom Jones, 647, for this claim. For a discussion of Jacobite ideologies, see Paul
Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
16 Battestin interprets Fielding’s analogy between gypsies and Jacobites as: “Fielding develops
an ironic parable of government designed to expose the Jacobite ideal of civil happiness
under an absolute monarchy as nothing more than an alluring, if dangerous, fantasy” (Tom
Jones, 666n2). Turner discusses such gypsy groups as outsiders in “Passages, Margins, and
Poverty,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974), 233. Partridge the wanderer is in danger of his liminality shifting
into such a permanent state of outsiderhood.
17 According to Turner, communitas “liberates the individual from the obligatory everyday
constraints of status and role, defines him as an integral human being with the capacity for
free choice, and ... presents for him a living model of human brotherhood and sisterhood”
(Dramas, 207). This feeling of brotherhood is precisely what Benedict Anderson claims as a
primary component of his “imagined communities”: “regardless of the actual equality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship.” Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7. I would argue that the problems with the Stuart
358 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

maturation in the journey to London and back to Paradise Hall, he

lives the life of the outsider that Partridge has been living for years.
Turner’s communitas offers only part of an explanation, however, of
what happens between Partridge and Tom, because in the eighteenth
century even brothers were members of a family hierarchy. Partridge
freely accompanies Tom on the journey, but the relationship is con-
tinuously charged with the suggestion of Tom’s greater inherent
worth. Partridge’s main reason for accompanying Tom is old-
fashioned fidelity and obligation to him as a proxy for Allworthy,
which ultimately turns out to be the right guess given Tom’s consan-
guinity with the patriarch.18 Because of this frequent suggestion that
Tom somehow represents Allworthy, the road trip suggests a point of
contact between the group will in Gemeinschaft and the individual will
in Gesellschaft. One such example of this process occurs as a con-
sequence of Partridge’s accidental misuse of the power of informa-
tion, which creates failures of understanding between the men and
brings the hierarchical aspects of their relationship into focus.
Partridge’s freedom with Tom’s personal matters at once attenuates
their bonds of friendship and prevents his fulfilment of servant duties.
In the traditional master-servant relationship, for example, discre-
tion is one of the master’s unspoken expectations; according to J. Jean
Hecht, “the master might expect fidelity and attachment from his
domestics no less than other members of his family. They were
supposed to guard his secrets, defend his good name against calumny
and harsh criticism, and in general make his interests their own.”19
Although a character such as Jenny Jones is aware of the repercussions
of gossip, Partridge lacks the information to understand fully its
economies, even though he himself is a victim of gossip in the
Allworthy expulsion.20 When Partridge encounters Sophia’s maid

succession and national identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hinge more on
familial and specifically paternal associations. On a related note, his argument that “all
communities are imagined” pertains to Partridge’s memories of his life in Allworthy’s
Gemeinschaft insofar as they are a construction of his mind. However, Tönnies’s definition of
community—which features the integral and acknowledged component of social structure—is
apposite for my purposes because Partridge longs for a community founded on hierarchy.
18 See Brown for a thorough discussion of Tom’s parentage and legitimacy.
19 See J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1956), 75.
20 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985) for a wide-ranging and
penetrating study of such economies, especially among women. Bruce Robbins also devotes
a chapter, “Surveillance and the Family,” to gossip in The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from
Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 103–12.
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 359

Honour Blackmore at the Upton inn, then, without even knowing her
he immediately lets slip that Tom is “in Bed with a Wench” (543).
Partridge’s gesture contains no malice, certainly; this incident is more
a reflection of Partridge’s natural loquacity than a desire to gain con-
trol over his “master,” whose virility he wishes to emulate. Partridge has
little idea that this seemingly inconsequential slip will lead to Sophia’s
fury at Tom for his infidelity to her. Thus Partridge neglects the duty
of secrecy that is expected of servants in the nuclear family and in the
household family; yet his situation at an inn, a mix of commercial and
domestic space, suggests the ambiguity of his obligations to Tom.
Although Tom has no authority to scold Partridge for his “infidel-
ity,” when he is unfaithful himself, he still assumes the betrayed
master/father position. Tom’s response to Partridge’s slip is to beat
him like a servant instead of talking to him, but then he turns the
scorn upon himself as he realizes the excess of his gesture. Curiously,
neither consequences nor intentions determine Tom’s punishment—
instead, Partridge’s temporary servant status has allowed this instance
of domination. If Partridge is a servant, he has ignored his duty, but if
he is a friend, he has simply been careless. Regardless of how they
might interpret the situation, neither Tom nor any self-respecting
gentleman would resort to beating his friend for such an indiscretion,
however harmful. Had Tom and Partridge not been friends, in this age
of “honour,” one would request a duel from a social equal for an
egregious offence.21 Tom looks upon Partridge as his inferior and is
therefore licensed to assert this authority with demeaning blows. In the
book, other instances of Tom’s physical aggression reflect his spirited
temperament, but Tom’s outburst here has a different context because
of Partridge’s pledges of service. Whether Tom has officially agreed
that Partridge is his servant or not, he often treats him like one.
The wide-reaching ramifications of such a seemingly inconse-
quential mistake furthermore suggest that during the journey, the
anonymity of characters such as Honour Blackmore and Sophia
Western places them at the mercy of those who can adapt to various
modes of association. For as much nostalgia as Partridge has for

21 The corrupt aristocrat Lord Fellamar delivers a duel challenge to Squire Western in London
through a messenger. When Western fails to accept the invitation (instead preferring old-
fashioned fisticuffs), the messenger replies, “I see, Sir, you are below my Notice, and I shall
inform his Lordship you are below his.—I am sorry I have dirtied my Fingers with you” (837).
Shortly thereafter, Mr Fitzpatrick demands satisfaction from Tom for his misidentification of
Tom as his wife’s paramour at the Upton inn (872). Neither of these men, however, upholds
a true sense of honour, pointing to Fielding’s disdain for the practice of duelling.
360 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Allworthy, he knows how to enjoy the playful ambiguity of the road

and inn. But what is playful to a middle-aged man could have serious
consequences for wandering women: Partridge persuades the Upton
inn landlady that Sophia and Honour are “A Couple of Bath Trulls”
when they arrive, the usual suspicion about unaccompanied ladies in
Fielding’s time (542–43). This blurring of social status can translate
differently for women, and the mistress and maid are trading one
form of domination (paternalism and patriarchy) for another (sexual
vulnerability on the road).
The status ambiguities also, oddly enough, reaffirm Honour’s lower
essential worth. Because Sophia and Honour have an established
mistress-maid relationship before they set out on their journey, the
social structures of the Western household are more clearly preserved
during it—Honour is always deferential to Sophia, who maintains a
mistress’s decorum. The journey is nonetheless a rite of passage for
Sophia, and clearly so—she ventures out on the road under the im-
minent threat of danger from highwaymen in order to pursue the
object of her love. Sophia’s position on the threshold is evident when
Honour uses the confusion at the inn to assert her own importance
over other servants, and ultimately to betray her mistress for Lady
Bellaston in London. Instead of using a self-serving means to return
to the original household from which she is banished like Partridge,
Honour progresses from effusive loyalty towards Sophia to a debased
gesellschaftlich instrumentality.

If the clash of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft creates places for

communitas to emerge, however fleeting, it more often blurs role
distinctions enough to create an array of social inversions and reposi-
tionings. Just as Tom “masters” his pseudo-father, he also assumes the
schoolmaster’s role, much to Partridge’s displeasure. And, as much as
Partridge displays his great learning, on at least two occasions he
exhibits his ignorance of Latin beyond a schoolboy’s grammar. As
Nancy Mace notes, “Partridge reveals the problems that occur when
those with a superficial classical education attempt to use it exten-
sively.”22 In a conversation with Tom after leaving the Upton inn, he
cannot translate the Horace that Tom quotes, referring to him as a

22 Nancy Mace, Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1996), 92.
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 361

“hard Author,” yet he becomes highly offended when Tom notices his
ineptitude (629). This happens again after the discovery of Sophia’s
banknote in the hands of the illiterate beggar on the road. Ironically
in this case, Partridge exposes his own Latin illiteracy when Tom tries
to discuss some points of criminal law with him. Again, Partridge be-
comes irritated at the evidence that he is not a master of his subject,
and, furthermore, that Tom could easily step into his vocation with
more expertise. This affair of the bank bill also exposes some of the
motives behind Partridge’s behaviour with Jones, because the dis-
covery of his ignorance is a result of arguing over whether to spend
some of Sophia’s money.23 Hence Partridge’s behaviour seems to stem
from a mixture of fidelity (group will) and self-interest (individual
will), but it continually makes him appear servile.
Partridge calls Tom “Domine” after Tom toasts him as “Doctissime
Tonsorum” (most learned of barbers); “domine” means “master” and
encompasses such courtesy titles as “lord” or “sir” (417). The OED also
cites the definition of “domine” as “schoolmaster,” which acknow-
ledges the particularly pedagogical inversion. Such ambiguous
phrases lead the reader to wonder why Partridge later so emphatically
insists to the group of servants in the inn, where the puppet show is
held, that he is not Tom’s servant, but a friend, companion, and
gentleman on par with him. This self-justification reflects the prob-
lems he faces during his peregrinations, especially since his threshold
position leads to regression rather than growth (643).24 In this one
episode, he boasts of the wealth of his “master,” questions Tom’s
sanity out loud, and covertly schemes to bring Tom back to Allworthy
for “the highest Rewards” (645). These seemingly contradictory ex-
pressions towards Tom occur after the episode in which the figure of
the puppet suggests Partridge’s own manipulations of his situation
with Tom. As the puppet show erupts into chaos, however, so do
Partridge’s plans dissolve, and he more closely resembles a servant,
the Merry Andrew, who is caught having sex with the maid shortly
before Partridge tries to proposition one of the gypsy women.
In Partridge’s pursuit of Allworthy’s former social structure, with
nostalgia reminiscent of Jacobitism, the absent presences of

23 This recalls Black George’s fraud concerning the banknotes that Allworthy gave to Tom,
discussed in Martin A. Kayman, “The ‘New Sort of Specialty’ and the ‘New Province of
Writing’: Bank Notes, Fiction and the Law in Tom Jones,” ELH 68 (2001), 633–53.
24 See Mace for an excellent discussion of Partridge’s scraps of Latin, 92–95. See also
Battestin’s note on the sources of Partridge’s Latin tags in Tom Jones, 419.
362 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Allworthy’s community explain the persistence of implicit status rela-

tions between the two, specifically concerning Tom’s choice to beat
Partridge as a servant. As we question each party’s motivation for his
association with the other, we notice that what should be explicit
between a master and a servant remains implicit between the two,
thus mimicking “natural” father-son relationships. This service rela-
tionship elaborates on the problems that Hecht and others find with
the presence of analogical familial structures in employment rela-
tionships.25 Although servants and masters did, as a rule, create
written service agreements, good for one year, Atiyah’s account of the
state of contract in general highlights the tug between tradition and
modernity in the law:

On the one hand, there were these newer notions about the inherently binding
nature of promises, but at the same time there were still the traditional ideas in
which promises were neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the creations
of obligations. In this older scheme, duties rose out of relationships or
transactions; even where the relationship or transaction was a consensual one,
such as a simple sale, the obligations that arose out of the transaction were, in
a sense, the consequence of the law, not simply the parties’ intentions.26

To return to Tönnies’s terms, the “modern” contract is a gesellschaftlich

form of association built on rational agreements between individuals,
suggesting a social structure not based on the familial, organic ties of
Gemeinschaft and of Atiyah’s explanation of the traditional contract.
Recalling the psychological aspects of Tönnies’s categories, Partridge
displays a flickering volition, asserting himself as an individual only to
desire subsumption into the Allworthean will that Tom represents.
Partridge therefore applies a gesellschaftlich strategy to set up a
scheme to return to Gemeinschaft. Such a strategy introduces a differ-
ent structure from Allworthy’s and distances him from his school-
master’s role by making it seem less like a “natural” emanation of his
being. In other words, he needs to work and scheme to be his “true
self.”27 The moment when Partridge nearly forces his service upon
Tom demonstrates the tension between the two parties’ senses of obli-
gation and calls into question any existence of concord between them.

25 See Hecht, Hill; and Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in
the London Household (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000).
26 Atiyah, 141. Kayman cites part of this passage (653n44).
27 This predicament suggests Partridge’s partial affinity with the tricky servant (servus callidus)
type character of New Comedy.
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 363

At first, Partridge suggests that by “attending” Tom on his “Expedi-

tion,” he can let Tom supposedly redress the wrongs that he inadver-
tently caused by being born: Partridge’s banishment, the loss of his
job, and his general social decline (425). Partridge is effective in
applying guilt to coerce Tom into assuming the role of the master,
and Tom’s obliging nature prevents him from casting off the man he
thought to be his father. No doubt Tom also retains some residual
sense of filial duty to the man—the spectral father of his youth—
having been conditioned by the belief throughout his nonage. 28
Although Tom lacks the financial and paternal power of the tradi-
tional master, Partridge’s pledge of fidelity to him places them in an
unusual role reversal: suddenly the older man takes on something of
a surrogate child role in his position as servant. This reversal is rein-
forced by the etymology of Partridge’s first name, Benjamin, which
refers to the youngest son of Jacob, who “was originally named
Benoni, ‘son of my sorrow,’ by his dying mother, but his father later
names him Benjamin, ‘son of the right hand.’”29 The story in Genesis
35:18 behind the name underscores Fielding’s irony in his presen-
tation of Partridge’s character, since the right hand is traditionally
associated with prosperity and adroitness, the very meaning of which
points to the right hand. Partridge is the “son of sorrow” for most of
the narrative, and Tom’s ascendancy as the patriarch of Paradise Hall
signals a figurative and felicitous renaming process for Partridge as he
is reincorporated into the community.30
The obvious reference to Jacob as a father furthermore reminds us
that Jacobus is Latin for James, hence the word “Jacobite” to describe
his followers. This suggests Partridge’s loyalty to the deposed king on
the level of etymology as well as character and calls to mind Fielding’s
discussion in The Jacobite’s Journal (9 July 1748) of the Hebrew etymol-
ogy of Jacob as “supplanter.” For Fielding, would-be supplanters of the
Hanoverian succession were politically dangerous: “the Character of
Supplanting is the true Mark of the Jacobite.”31 Earlier in the Journal,
28 See Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995), in which she maintains that Partridge “exists in the novel
within a kind of perpetual ghosting hour—with himself as chief ghost” (176).
29 The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, ed. E.G. Withycombe (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1945), 22.
30 We might also consider Tom himself as a “son of sorrow” to Partridge and Jenny Jones
because of their unhappy expulsion from Allworthy’s community, but also because he is
born close to the death of his father Summer.
31 The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 331–33.
364 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Fielding’s “Genealogy of a Jacobite” (12 March 1748) provides a scan-

dalous family tree for one of Partridge’s political ilk. This parody of the
genealogies in Genesis claims that “Priest-craft begot Lineal
Succession, Lineal Succession begot Indelible Character, Indelible
Character begot Blind Obedience, Blind Obedience begot False
Worship,” and so on down to the individual Jacobite.32 The etymology
of Jacob and the perverse genealogy suggest, then, the condition of
replacement and displacement at the heart of Partridge’s character—a
son who inherits a legacy of illegitimacy.
Partridge’s significance as a son, or childlike character, suggests both
the demographic profile and cultural representation of eighteenth-
century servants. Peter Laslett argues that servants in eighteenth-
century England “were certainly in some senses children in that era”
since a “fair proportion of them [were] in their early teens and a half
or more under 21. They were in some way treated like children by
their masters and mistresses, even when they were rather older,
because [one] had to be married in that society to be accepted as fully
grown up.”33 Partridge’s character helps to clarify Laslett’s discussion
of service as a part of the life-cycle by figuring this kind of employment
as part of the rite of passage. Although Partridge should have passed
out of this stage by the time Tom meets him on the road, the
temporariness of his service shares an affinity with the predominantly
adolescent and temporary social institution of domestic service.
Tom and Partridge thus become surrogate fathers and surrogate
sons, according to the situation, alternately creating horizontal forms
of association and exposing the problems of traditional modes of
deference and authority, modes that were often highly localized.
Many cases tried by the Justices of the Peace, who dealt with master-
servant complaints, describe situations in which one side of the em-
ployment contract was broken.34 Because of Justices’ administration

32 The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, 194.

33 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 163. See also Laslett, The World We Have
Lost—Further Explored (London: Routledge, 1983), for development of the idea of “life-cycle
service,” which indicates that being a servant was, for most Early Modern English youth, a
temporary period of employment before settling down and creating their own domestic
spheres. Robbins discusses this as a trope in literature with reference to Stone’s The Family,
Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800. See Robbins, 150–51.
34 See Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), esp. “The Single Justice: Varieties of Paternalism,” 173–208, for a detailed
account of the men who, for the most part, settled disputes between masters and servants,
thus giving this aspect of the law a decidedly local and traditional flavour. The Justices were
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 365

of the law, and the ad hoc character of the majority of the sessions,
rural master-servant relationships were, for the most part, still firmly
rooted in the paternalistic Gemeinschaft of the country squirearchy.
These relationships form the basis of the customary contracts that
Atiyah describes. In Fielding’s time, even the law would not erase the
advantage of the employer over the servant. Bridget Hill explains that
the breach of contract in the master-servant agreement was a criminal
offence for the servant but only a civil offence for the master; the
servant could be jailed for not following orders, but a master would
only have to pay a small fine for ignoring his obligations.35
Partridge’s and Tom’s characters were drawn at a moment in history
when traditional and modern forms of association overlapped in new
ways, many of which, as I have shown, were based on analogues to the
family and clash most noticeably in the servant role.36 The family as an
ideal form proves to be an inadequate basis for a code of obligations
between master and servant precisely because it is a fluid structure in
practice. The master-servant relationship, then, as defined by the law,
contends with the local character of rural magistracies, who face the
dilemma of upholding the abstract ideals of justice while they

also usually masters themselves, which added an extra layer of complexity to interpreting the
law. Fielding, as a Justice, was intimately aware of these complexities.
35 Hill, 102. See The Covent Garden Journal, no. 64 (30 September 1752), for Fielding’s argument
against giving “unjust Characters” to servants. The Covent Garden Journal and A Plan of the
Universal Register Office , ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,
1988). Although Fielding’s own legal reforms did not focus on master-servant law and
involved London primarily, he was concerned with justice for the lower orders. The Bow
Street Runners and the Universal Register Office reflected the necessity of gesellschaftlich
associations in the often anonymous and more fluid urban world. Fielding suggested that
employers represent their servants’ skills and moral virtues justly in the recommendations,
or “characters,” that the workers would take to the next place of employment. These
recommendations took the place of reputations cultivated under the watch of tightly knit
communities and were frequently drawn inaccurately.
36 See Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press International, 1991). “Sometimes, with a character like Partridge, Fielding
surrenders a little further than usual to the unpredictable variousness of human nature:
thus, in Tom Jones, II, iii, Partridge is a good-natured, convivial man who is then suddenly
glimpsed as hating Jenny Jones ‘with no small inveteracy’; in VIII,vi and vii, we see his real
generosity and loyalty to Tom, and then learn that it is also self-interested; and elsewhere
again we know him as a pedantic incompetent grammarian, as an amiable compulsive liar,
and many other things” (Rawson, 63–64). On the legal category of servant, see John Zom-
chick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher Tomlins, “Subordination,
Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 47
(Spring 1995), 56–90; and Douglas Hay, “Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare: Masters,
Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England,” International Labor and Working-
Class History 53 (Spring 1998), 27–49.
366 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

encounter individuals on the local level representing different status

groups with traditional rights and privileges.37

Although Partridge figures his earlier position of schoolmaster as a

high calling, it is essentially a service position in Allworthy’s Gemein-
schaft. He was not within the walls of the household but was still within
Allworthy’s sphere of influence. His projection of a servile persona
with Tom therefore appears as a permutation of a previous role:
“Though the Pride of Partridge did not submit to acknowledge himself
a Servant, yet he condescended in most Particulars to imitate the
Manners of that Rank” (643). In the Upton inn, Partridge gravitates
towards the company of the servants, and he performs the physical
labour of carrying Tom’s belongings, securing lodging, and other
similar functions. Instead of proving his worth through honourable
actions, he contentedly basks in the aura of his master as a proxy for
Allworthy—Tom’s supposed wealth dazzles Partridge so much that he
wants to associate himself with it in some way. His servile behaviour is
thus an example of the social structure in transition, but also the
persistence of custom and ingrained habit.
Partridge believes so much in Allworthy’s power within his commun-
ity that he plans to use his name like an amulet or magic charm to
further a scheme of legal transgression. At the Upton inn, Partridge
suggests that he and Tom steal some horses, claiming that this mark of
distinction befits such a gentleman as Tom and, by extension, himself:

Now as the Honesty of Partridge was equal to his Understanding, and both dealt
only in small Matters, he would never have attempted a Roguery of this Kind,
had he not imagined it altogether safe; for he was one of those who have more
Consideration of the Gallows than in the Fitness of Things; but, in Reality, he
thought that he might have committed this Felony without any Danger: For, be-
sides that he doubted not but the Name of Mr. Allworthy would sufficiently quiet
the Landlord. (547)

The narrator’s irony here reminds the reader that Partridge does not
actively pursue virtue, even for all of his sententious phrases; the

37 For a discussion of the problems created when custom-based practices face off with written
laws, see E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane,
1975). See Meldrum on casual service in the metropolis, which included arrangements that
were temporary and usually arranged orally (31–32).
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 367

explanation of Partridge’s gaffes as emanating from his small-

mindedness marks the difference between his intrinsic worth and that
of Tom, who forbids him to steal the horses. With especial irony,
Partridge tries to use the name of a Justice of the Peace to allow him
to commit a felony. Although his nostalgia for Allworthy’s Gemeinschaft
cannot justify the crime, Partridge views this in terms of protection
and care from his proxy paternalist master. For all the loyalty he
displays to Allworthy, Partridge’s desire for instant gratification and
recognition runs counter to the status and tradition-based community
to which he desires to return.
The narrator’s comment that Partridge has “more concern for the
Gallows” than for the “Fitness of Things” suggests that he cares less for
intrinsic worth than the ultimate outcome of a situation; the reward
or punishment is more important than the status of the deed itself.38
Such emphasis on self-preservation over forms of tradition suggests
Gesellschaft. This category, Tönnies would argue, can be useful in
defining relationships through reason, but Partridge’s reasoning turns
Tom into an object. To reach his outcome of restoration, he proceeds
(before being thwarted by Tom) in a manner antithetical to
Allworthy’s fundamental values. Although Allworthy is not infallible
in his judgments, he certainly does not countenance thievery. For
example, Allworthy seeks to punish George Seagrim to the fullest
extent of the law for his banknote theft and even admonishes Tom for
wanting to forgive George too easily: “Such mistaken Mercy is not only
Weakness, but borders on Injustice, and is very pernicious to Society,
as it encourages Vice” (969). Partridge therefore understands neither
his function in relation to Allworthy’s Gemeinschaft nor its fundamental
values.
38 This phrase is associated with the philosopher Square—see, for example, Fielding, Tom Jones,
132. On the use of this phrase, J. Paul Hunter writes, “It may now seem unlikely— except to
students of the rhetoric of modern ideological controversy—that anyone seriously used, and
tirelessly repeated, catch phrases like ‘the eternal fitness of things’ and ‘the unalterable rule
of right’; but the ethical and theological controversies of the 1730s and 40s are full of them.
Even in that context [Thomas] Chubb’s stylistic habits stood out, and he became especially
associated with the phrases Fielding bestows on Square.” Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry
Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 125.
Hunter also draws a parallel between Chubb and Stephen Duck as self-made men, with no
formal education, and discusses their reliance on patronage. Battestin also weighs in on this
phrase: “The inadequacy of Square’s speculative Shaftesburianism is clearly demonstrated by
its inability to account for the reality of unmerited suffering (the occasion of Tom’s broken
arm) or to provide a reliable moral imperative (the encounter in Molly Seagrim’s closet). In
Square’s eventual acceptance of Christian revelation we may witness the ultimate insufficiency
of a philosophy founded solely upon the cant concepts of ‘the natural beauty of virtue’ and
the ‘eternal fitness of things’” (Moral Basis, 13).
368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

However, that Partridge even considers this action as a possibility

reflects on the abuse of the law that its local character encouraged.
Recall in Joseph Andrews, for instance, when Parson Adams is appre-
hended with Fanny and brought before a Justice of the Peace, who
has no qualms about sending the Parson to await trial in jail for
“several Months.”39 He is released only when a squire present by
chance vouches for him. In a similar example in Joseph Andrews, Lady
Booby tries to prevent Joseph’s right of settlement as a servant work-
ing in her parish with the help of her lawyer, Scout; he reassures Lady
Booby, “The Laws of this Land are not so vulgar, to permit a mean
Fellow to contend with one of your Ladyship’s Fortune. We have one
sure Card, which is to carry him before Justice Frolick, who upon
hearing your Ladyship’s Name, will commit him without any farther
Questions.”40 Lady Booby’s country seat creates a striking contrast with
Allworthy’s, as the residents obey her out of fear rather than a sense
of fellow feeling. Her wealth allows her an uneasy position as a
matriarch; she is completely self-consumed, and her calculative and
rational will is at work rather than an essential concord within her
household and community.
Within Allworthy’s household, his dependents demonstrate both
types of association, as the gesellschaftlich rational will leads them to
jockey for position among other dependents in the gemeinschaftlich
household family. In part, this is because none of them aside from
Blifil—as far as we know—is his blood relation, and they have to work
to insert themselves into a suitably familial role. We may read Tom
and Partridge’s association after the pattern of Allworthy and Black
George’s. Like Partridge, Black George is at once part of Allworthy’s
extended household family and residing outside of Paradise Hall, so
he is more precisely a servant in husbandry rather than a domestic
servant.41 We observe George’s own conflicts between loyalty to
Allworthy, and young Tom as his substitute, and downright selfish
means of propagating his own domestic realm.42

39 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin Battestin, intro. Fredson Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 1967), 148.
40 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 285.
41 See Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981). This category of service encompassed rural workers, who were not
strictly confined to the domestic realm.
42 According to Maaja Stewart, Fielding “represents the poor through characters like Jenny,
Partridge, and Black George, who try to act as autonomous individuals rather than as depen-
dents within a traditional social system. In small ways and large, the ideology of their culture
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 369

If we move more closely to Paradise Hall itself, Tom’s relationship

with Thwackum and Square sets up our expectations for his later bond
with Partridge in a sense somewhat different from Black George’s but
still hinging on the tension between dependence and self-interest.
Thwackum and Square are incompetent pedagogues, but Tom’s good
nature and native wit trump their love of system and jargon. Their
incessant platitudes resemble Partridge’s Latin tags but serve a far
more pernicious agenda of elevating Blifil over Tom and ingratiating
themselves with the younger man. Square’s “Eternal Fitness of Things”
suggests the height of Gemeinschaft as an ideal type. When Tom catches
Square in a compromising position with Molly Seagrim, however,
Square finesses his philosophical position in order to rationalize his
philandering. He argues that “Fitness is governed by the Nature of
Things, and not by Customs, Forms, or municipal Laws. Nothing is, in-
deed, unfit which is not unnatural,” thus disregarding the customary
and seemingly “natural,” sanctioned communal associations that he
subverts in his affair with Molly (232). Thwackum, on the other hand,
under the guise of gemeinschaftlich religion (the ultimate submission to
a greater will) actually perverts the utility of Gesellschaft by replacing
individual rational will with brute force. As Allworthy’s supposed
agents, Thwackum and Square do not live up to their roles as edu-
cators because their minds are so limited, but they are much more
malicious and ruthless than Partridge ever is. Their rhetoric of God
and Nature cloaks them safely in normative and universal terms even
as Thwackum applies harsher punishment to Tom than to Blifil and
Square propounds a relativistic moral code to justify his own desires.
When Partridge does finally meet with Allworthy again in London,
however, the encounter does not fulfil the former schoolmaster’s
expectations. Just as Partridge never doubts that Tom is Allworthy’s
son, Allworthy never doubts that Partridge is Tom’s real father.
Allworthy reacts to Partridge in London with a kind of opprobrious
perplexity because, from all appearances, Partridge is Tom’s servant.
Partridge replies, “I can’t say, Sir, ... that I am regularly a Servant, but
I live with him, an’t please your Honour, at present. Non sum qualis
eram” (I am not what I was) (935). Once again, Partridge suggests that
he has undergone an ontological shift, or has been forced into one,

supports their assumption of freedom whereas the practical realities do not.” “Ingratitude
in Tom Jones,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89:4 (1990), 516. My interpretation,
inflected by Tönnies’s theories of community and civil society, demonstrates that Partridge,
in particular, wants to be independent so that he can return to a state of dependence.
370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

more precisely, in which he cannot pursue the mode of being that is

most natural to him. The almost subconscious emergence of his Latin
tags suggests his “natural” role emerging, his sense that he is closer to
his proper social and linguistic context. His quotation, taken from
Horace’s Odes IV.i.3, reinforces his position as an older man looking
back on cherished memories, but this reference also suggests the
upcoming revelation of Tom’s parentage, the more profound
ontological shift of the two.
Even as he listens to Partridge’s narrative of his adventures,
Allworthy has a difficult time believing what is beyond his own juris-
diction—or, more specifically, he refuses at first to accept evidence
that would overturn his previous decision concerning the former
schoolmaster. Allworthy, in his role of Justice of the Peace, thus
exemplifies the mixed character of social roles in the overlap of the
national and the local. He resolves the disputes of people whom he
considers part of his extended family but also functions as the inter-
preter and enforcer of the laws of his country.43 Atiyah explains this
generalizing tendency beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century:
“As the law moved increasingly to a recognition of the generally bind-
ing nature of promises and contracts, it became possible to generalize.
Law now began to be about promises, wills, intentions, contracts; and
not about particular relationships and particular transactions.”44 In the
context of Allworthy’s magistracy, in which his particular relationship
to his jurisdiction takes precedence over general rules, the conflation
of familial and legal roles requires special facility in mediating between
the two modes of association. Pulled away from the location of his own
Gemeinschaft, he is disoriented by Partridge’s claims.
After Partridge recounts his string of misfortunes, Allworthy
responds, “What am I to think of this Matter? ... For what Purpose
should you so strongly deny a Fact, which I think that it would be
rather your Interest to own?” (938).45 This statement points to

43 In an article responding to Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,

Richetti notes, “Individualistic identity is still very much involved in communal relationships
and social traditions. In such arrangements, public and private intertwine, and public life
is sustained by private affiliations and alliances that to modern eyes look scandalous or
corrupt.” Richetti, “The Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Social Criticism
and Narrative Enactment,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (November 1992), 117.
44 Atiyah, 215.
45 John Loftis compares the structure of this conversation to a trial, which brings to mind the
earlier trial that Partridge undergoes to suggest that Fielding mistrusts pure circumstantial
evidence. “Trials and the Shaping of Identity in Tom Jones,” Studies in the Novel 34:1 (2002),
13–14.
 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 371

Partridge’s interest in returning to the patriarch of his community

rather than claiming his rights as a parent. Considering the impor-
tance of legitimacy to the inheritance of property in the society, it is no
surprise that Justice Allworthy uses words such as “Interest” and “own”
to discuss familial relationships. After all, Justices dealt with many such
aspects of family law. This unmediated encounter between Partridge
and Allworthy does not secure Partridge’s happy ending, however. The
scepticism with which Allworthy meets him—he hardly welcomes the
former schoolmaster with open arms—is an anticlimactic reunion.
The structure is only recuperated for Partridge when the good
Hanoverian Tom steps into the patriarch role. As Wolfram Schmidgen
observes, “Tom’s accession to Paradise Hall vindicates the dis-
placement of genealogical by possessive rights.”46 Partridge, of course,
participates in a final replacement of his old life with a new, more
hopeful one. His narrative trajectory in Tom Jones ends in the
following way: “Jones hath settled 50l. a Year on him; and he hath
again set up a School, in which he meets with much better Encour-
agement than formerly; and there is now a Treaty of Marriage on
Foot, between him and Miss Molly Seagrim, which through the Media-
tion of Sophia, is likely to take Effect” (980–81). Although Molly might
not be the first woman one would think of for Partridge’s bride, his
analogy with Square as a pedagogue suggests an easy substitution.
Tom’s possible father ends up marrying the possible mother of the
younger man’s children. Although Tom’s paternity is disproven
earlier in the book, this coupling emphasizes for a final time the
complicated family relationships throughout the novel.
My reading of Tom Jones, then, suggests some new ways to consider
the relationship between subjectivity and authority within heter-
ogeneous eighteenth-century households and communities (and their
margins), where creating concord without blood ties in a primarily

46 Schmidgen, 150. Locke’s claim in the Second Treatise of Government that property rights arise
from labour invested suggests that Tom’s reward of the Allworthy estate is based on de-
servedness. Locke, Two Treatises of Government , ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988). It is uncertain, though doubtful, whether Partridge himself owns
property at the end of the novel. Locke’s famous phrase “the Turfs my Servant has cut” as
he enumerates the criteria for property ownership draws attention to the persistence of
patriarchal thinking even in a text devoted to arguing for possessive individualism (Second
Treatise of Government, 289). This same dynamic seems to be at work with Partridge’s ending
of comedic renewal even as he accepts a living from the new patriarch. For a broader
argument about Locke’s importance for studying representations of the eighteenth-century
family, see Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain,
1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40–50.
372 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

functional relationship involves making the master’s interest one’s

own for personal gain.47 Admittedly, I have focused primarily on
father-son relationships and their analogues, but this mode of analysis
could open up a deeper understanding of maternal analogues as well.
This is especially important, since eighteenth-century women’s legal
and social identities, not to mention their individual volition, were
often subsumed under those of their husbands. This article has, I
hope, illuminated the familial structures in Tom Jones as bases for
moral choices and actions, in addition to political legitimacy. As
Fielding’s novel is but one of many novels that interrogate such famil-
ial structures, the framework that I have outlined offers ways to
examine the tension between tradition and modernity that particu-
larly characterized social relations in eighteenth-century fiction. 48

University of Wisconsin—Madison

47 For a different line of argument on authority, see Eric Rothstein, “Virtues of Authority in
Tom Jones,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 28:2 (1987), 99–126.
48 I am grateful to Eric Rothstein, Howard Weinbrot, Steven Belletto, Sharon Twigg, and David
Lacroix for their comments on drafts of this article.