Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Book VIII traces Tom's journey from Bristol to Gloucester, and witnesses the beginning of his relationship with Partridge, who becomes his servant. The abundance of characters and scenes introduced in this chapter is further complicated by the fact that Partridge, when he first meets Jones, is living under the pseudonym of "little Benjamin." Fielding uses this ploy of entangling people's names and stories later in the novel to magnify the novel's intrigue. As the novel progresses into more and more social terrain, people's identities become more suspect. In Chapter II, Fielding mocks the attitude of landlords and landladies, who flock to travelers whom they perceive to be of the gentry and reject those of the lower classes. Typically, Fielding dresses up this criticism as a positive quality, but the perceptions of these sycophants are based on appearance alone. It is noteworthy that the final five chapters of Book VIII are dominated by the history of the Man of the Hill, this being the longest of the narrator's deviations from the central story. These digressions allow one to group Tom Jones with Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, which self-consciously rejects coherent, linear narrative in favor of a sporadic, disrupted narrative. Both Fielding and Sterne distinguished themselves from their time by their tendency toward fragmentation. Yet Fielding's structural decisions could also be put down to the fact that he thinks of his work as an epic, along the lines of the twelve-book Aeneid.. Tom's adventures, and the integration of other characters' adventures, propel the novel to epic heights. Yet in Chapter I of Book VIII, Fielding separates his epic from Classical epics by distinguishing his genre—the "Marvellous"—from the "Incredible." Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, and Ulysses, the hero of Homer's Odyssey, are constantly saved from calamity by "supernatural Agents." Fielding refuses to write according to such laws—his characters must all be human—and even introduces real people into his fictional work. In Chapter VIII he refers in passing to a "Mr. Timothy Harris," who was an inn-keeper during Fielding's time. Such references not only keep Fielding's work grounded in reality, but also add an authenticity to Fielding's narrative.