Fielding's Style

Author(s): Jill Campbell

Source: ELH, Vol. 72, No. 2, Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson (Summer, 2005), pp. 407-428
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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FIELDING'S STYLE

BY JILL CAMPBELL

Come, bright Love of Fame, inspire my glowing Breast: Not thee I

call, who over swelling Tides of Blood and Tears, dost bear the Heroe
on to Glory,while Sighs of Millions waft his spreading Sails;but thee,
fair, gentle Maid, whom Mnesis, happy Nymph, first on the Banks of
Hebrus did produce. Thee, whom Maeonia educated, whom Mantua
charm'd, and who, on that fair Hill which overlooks the proud Me-
tropolis of Britain, satst, with thy Milton, sweetly tuning the Heroic
Lyre; fill my ravished Fancy with the Hopes of charming Ages yet to
come. Foretel me that some tender Maid, whose Grandmotheris yet
unborn, hereafter, when, under the fictitious Name of Sophia, she
reads the real Worth which once existed in my Charlotte, shall, from
her sympathetic Breast, send forth the heaving Sigh. Do thou teach
me not only to foresee, but to enjoy,nay,even to feed on future Praise.
Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in
which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box,
I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me,
and whom I shall neither know nor see.

-Henry Fielding, TomJones (1749)

The topic announced by this essay's title is seemingly old-fash-

ioned--perhaps some would even say, reactionary. The word "style"
invokes questions of aesthetic appreciation that several decades of
contextualizing criticism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s moved far
from the center of literary study; to attempt to describe an individual
author's style might seem to bespeak an antiquated belief in some
ineffable quality adhering in that author, independent of his historical
period or circumstances and of the import of his work. In one particu-
larly hard-nosed view, for example, writing in 1978 on literature as an
ideological form, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey placed the word
"style"in ironic quotation marks and used it to encapsulate all that a
materialist approach to literature must reject: insisting on literature's
necessary place within the determinate processes and reproduction
of the contradictory linguistic practices of the common tongue," they
asserted that "the ideology of literature, itself a part of literature...
work[s] ceaselessly to deny this objective base: to represent literature

ELH 72 (2005) 407-428 a 2005 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress 407

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supremely as 'style,' as individual genius, conscious or natural, as
creativity, etc., as something outside (and above) the process of educa-
tion."1 In his classic 1993 essay on imperialism in Austen's Mansfield
Park, Edward Said dismissively referred to "stylistic finish" as one of
the deceptively neutral literary values of those refined novel readers
who nonetheless share "ideas about dependent races and territories"
with "foreign-office executives, colonial bureaucrats, [and] military
strategists."2 Seeking energetically to investigate, to understand, or
even aggressively to "expose" literary works' relations to their histori-
cal moments, both as effects and as causal forces, literary critics of
the late twentieth century also exposed the historical contingency of
the category of "literature" itself as a separate and timeless realm,
including the fetishization of style.
Without reverting to old notions of literature or the aesthetic as
ahistorical and "pure," some literary critics of the mid to late 1990s
initiated a rapprochement-some of them hesitantly, apologetically,
others in a bold and polemical mode--with the term literature and
with questions of the distinctively literary or aesthetic features, and
even pleasures, of literary works. As George Levine commented in
1996: "[W]e have to understand that if there is no literature, there is
no profession [of literary studies]." Less strictly pragmatically,he added
his spare attestation of faith that literary study consists of "reading
the sorts of texts that test most fully the possibilities of language and
meaning, and using skills developed to engage those texts successfully."3
Meditating on the question of Fielding's style two hundred and fifty
years after his death, I have found myself simultaneously brooding on
the present and future state of literary studies. In what follows I will
draw on critical approaches to literary style formulated over the last six
decades, ranging from 1958 to 2004. I will also draw on approaches to
style forged for use in that other, large but often unacknowledged part
of our profession-"composition" and instruction in writing-which
Levine alludes to only in passing as he imagines the profession's sur-
vival or demise.4 What light do the practical style handbooks we assign
to the young writers in our twenty-first-century classes shed on the
features of Fielding's antique and highly literary style? Attending to
style provides one useful focus for exploring our sometimes inarticu-
late or obscure and yet persistent faith in the literariness of literary
works; it also offers opportunities to note disjunctions-and connec-
tions-among the different activities within our profession, those
dependent on the status of literature, highly valued but shadowed by
doubt, and those largely independent of that status, taken for granted

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as routine. In doing so, I will dwell especially on questions of time--of
historical change, of the elapsing of time in the act of reading, and of
what persists or recurs across time-as well as on the paired terms
of materiality and immateriality that Balibar and Macherey's severely
demystifying perspective has introduced. I will be using those terms,
admittedly, in senses very different from their own.

A 2003 book on Jane Austen offers a recent model for a study of

style, and its approach to Austen's style obliquely engages with the
preoccupations I have already raised about literary works' relations to
historical conditions. Sadly but suggestively for our purposes, this book
explicitly disqualifies Henry Fielding as an interesting practitioner of
style. I refer to D. A. Miller's slender and provocative critical volume,
Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Miller provides a narrow defini-
tion of the phenomenon that he demarcates as Style-with-a-capital-S,
to distinguish it from other uses of the term style. For him, Style,
as epitomized by Austen, consists in "absolute impersonality," in the
achievement of something that he at once calls a "voice"and describes
as "dematerializ[ed]"-that is, the voice of No-One in particular, not
only an "out-of-body" voice but a voice that has transcended person-
hood itself, as personhood is defined by aspects of social positioning,
such as gender, class, age, and marital status. Style for Miller consists
precisely in the negation of personal subjectivity, in a stringent "refusal
to realize its author personally"; and only Austen in his view has truly
attained Style by this measure. Indeed, he declares (in a formulation
that mixes grandly old-fashioned with new-fangled terms) that it is
Austen's "great world-historical achievement..,. to have established,
within the boundlessly oppressive imperiums of gender, conjugality,and
the Person, something like extraterritoriality."5He cites the examples
of Fielding and Thackeray to demonstrate just how singular Austen's
stylistic achievement is, as thus defined:

Whether our standardis Fielding in the eighteenth century,or

Thackerayin the nineteenth,the omniscientnarrator's divinityproves
constantlybetrayedby his humanverisimilitude,the all-too-familiar
"character"withwhichhe can'thelptendingto coincide.Pronounced
withthe thickaccentof the sociolectthatimmediatelysits him down
on one or anotherchairof distinctlyinstitutional,unmistakablymale
hisomniscienceseemshardlymorethana poeticallylicensed
authority,
exaggerationof the kindsof empoweredknowledgethat are already

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 possessed,alreadydisplayedand exercised,by variousmen in the
nonfictionalworld:a learnedmagistrate,say,or a gossipyclubman.
Farfromenactinga fantasyof divineauthority, the noisypersonalities
of FieldingandThackerayrelentlesslyhumanizethatauthority, never
let us forgetits earthlyoriginsas a glamorization of some garden-
varietymale know-it-all.... By contrast,Austen'sdivinityis free of
all accentsthat mightidentifyit with a sociallyaccreditedbrokerof
power/knowledge in the worldundernarration.... Nowhereelse in
nineteenth-century Englishnarrationhavethe claimsof the "person,
its ideology,been morecompletelydenied.6

Miller's recoil from Fielding and Thackeray in this passage con-

veys not only his personal distaste for the particular literary manners
they have to offer, but also an implicit awareness of the diagnosis
of literature's ideological alliances and effects advanced by Balibar,
Macherey, and a host of others in recent decades. Although he never
says so, it seems that in this critical climate, Miller's own extravagant
and loving tribute to literary style can be framed only by insisting that
True Style consists in a manner strictly disassociated from "the thick
accent of the sociolect that immediately sits [the author] down on one
or another chair of distinctly institutional... authority";what he calls
Style is gained by renouncing any proximityto the "kindsof empowered
knowledge" that a writer as a social individual might otherwise possess.
That renunciation requires the sacrifice not only of special claims to
social authority and power, which might taint the literary work with
ideological aims, but also of personality itself-and an investment in
the ideology of the "person" in general. Fielding and Thackeray have
not achieved this sacrifice; their "noisy personalities" inflect their liter-
ary voices with the stigmatizing "thick accent[s]" of particular social
positions, while Austen's narrator speaks in a voice divinely "free of
all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of
power/knowledge in the world under narration."
The sample of Fielding's prose with which I began, the opening
paragraph of Book 13, chapter 1, of TomJones, certainly does seem to
disqualify Fielding's writing from this particular,idiosyncratic definition
of Style. The author there speaks in the first-person of his personal
circumstances and states of mind: the little parlor in which he writes,
his mournful recollection of his wife Charlotte's "real Worth," his own
anticipation of death, his yearning for literary immortality. Further-
more, the manner in which he speaks, however playfully-in a high
and archaic literary style, incorporating the rhythms of iambic verse,
learned allusions, conventional formulae, and antiquated pronouns and

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verb forms-must, in Miller's terms, "sit him down on one or another
chair of distinctly institutional, unmistakably male authority" as surely
as we see him in our mind's eye sitting literally on a chair in the little
parlor in which he writes. The overt autobiographical content of this
paragraph, elegiac and yearning, is blended through style with the
reader's underlying awareness of the writer'sprivileges as the recipient
of an elite education and participant in male literary circles.
While Miller rejects the "human verisimilitude, the all-too-familiar
'character' with which [the narrator of Fielding's novels] can't help
tending to coincide" as a pitifully inferior alternative to Austen's
impersonal or dematerialized authority, the strong presence of the
figure of the narrator in Fielding's novels, particularly in Tom Jones,
has been seen by others as one of Fielding's great achievements. In
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth identifies the narrator of
TomJones himself as one of the novel's main characters and describes
the story of the narrator'sdeveloping intimacy with the reader as an
important and effective "subplot"of the novel. In sketching this view,
Booth refers to the moments in which the narrator directly addresses
the reader, culminating in his farewell to the reader in the first chap-
ter of the novel's final book; but he also implies that our sense of the
"character"of the narrator on whom we rely is continually supported
and developed in the novel by his manner of speaking-by his literary
style. This character, Booth suggests, both is and isn't the author Field-
ing. "The gift [the narrator] leaves [us when he bids us farewell]-his
book-is himself, precisely himself. The author has created this self
as he has written the book. The book and the friend are one. 'For
however short the period may be of my own performances, they will
most probably outlive their own infirm author, and the weakly produc-
tions of his abusive contemporaries.' Was Fielding literally infirm as
he wrote that sentence? It matters not in the least. It is not Fielding
we care about, but the narrator created to speak in his name."7
If it is largely through style, however, that "[t]he book and the
friend [that is, the character of the narrator] are made one," there is
a long tradition of understanding literary style not as Miller describes
it, as an achievement of de-personalization, but rather, as the opposite:
in the oft-quoted line from Buffon, "The style is the man himself."8
Or, as J. Middleton Murry puts it somewhat less epigramatically,
"a true idiosyncrasy of style [is] the result of an author's success in
compelling language to conform to his mode of experience."9 In his
1959 essay "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style," Richard
Ohmann elaborates on Murry's notion of the author's "mode of ex-

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perience," suggesting that any one of those "patterns of expression"
which constitute stylistic features-whether "a heavy dependence on
abstraction, a peculiar use of the present tense, a habitual evocation
of similarities through parallel structure, [or] a tendency to place feel-
ings in syntactical positions of agency"-"when repeated with unusual
frequency, is the sign of a habit of meaning, and thus of a persistent
way of sorting out the phenomena of experience." Stylistic features,
he proposes, reflect "epistemic choices"-they convey, along with
a statement's specific "content," the underlying matter of "how [a
writer] thinks, how he comes to know, how he imposes order on the
ephemeral pandemonium of experience."'0 In other words, whether
or not Fielding as the author creating the narrator of TomJones was
literally infirm as he wrote the sentence Booth quotes, the distinctive
stylistic voice he provided for that narrator,whose qualities Booth so
admires, may express deep features of the author himself, ones that
he himself would not have been able to name.
The fact that we use the word "voice" so commonly and famil-
iarly as a term for personal literary style, as I just did in referring to
Fielding's style in TomJones, itself suggests our experience of written
style as intrinsically grounded in the individual, and specifically in the
individual as an embodied person. It seems right to us, somehow, to
imagine an author'swritten style as the textual equivalent of a person's
spoken voice, its unique total effect created by the combination of
physiological features and a personal history of experiences of lan-
guage, which, together, give it its distinctive accents and inflections
as well as timbre, pitch, and tone. This impressionistic usage of the
metaphor of voice-the paradox of "the voice on the page"-can be
found alike in the practical pages of composition textbooks and style
manuals, including the popular guides by William Zinsser and by the
Fielding scholar Sheridan Baker, and in the more lofty discussions of
commentators on literary style. Miller himself uses it in the opening
sentences of his account of Austen's style, first to invoke the distinctive
appeal of what he calls "the siren lure of her voice," and then, in a
further turn of the paradox, to identify that voice as "truly"an "out-
of-body" one, "so stirringly free of what it abhorred as 'particularity'
or 'singularity' that it seemed to come from no enunciator at all.""
We have already heard that Miller finds Fielding's voice, by contrast,
all too self-evidently embodied-marked, that is, by its origins in a
writer whose particular social as well as physiological embodiment is
manifest at every turn. Whether Fielding's own body is firm or infirm,
then, in the example Wayne Booth gives, his narratorspeaks as he does

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because of who Fielding is. And how is it, it is time to ask, that that
narrator does "speak"? How might the two opposing views of style
I have sketched-as paradigmatically impersonal and disembodied,
and as expressive of personhood at the deepest levels of individual
modes of experience and thought-be applied to our experience of
Fielding's style?
We might take some cues, first, from Fielding's appearances in
that other, more practical realm of writing about writing in which we
find the word "style"-the "style handbooks," guides to punctuation,
syntax, and composition principles, which I mentioned above. I regret
to report that Fielding's appearance in such books is no more flatter-
ing than his cameo in Miller's essay on Austen's Style. As Ohmann
notes in his provocative essay on composition textbooks, "Use Defi-
nite, Specific, Concrete Language" (published thirty years after his
so-called prolegomena to the analysis of prose style), one Houghton
Mifflin composition text presents a passage from Fielding's TomJones
in paired contrast with one from Nevil Shute's On the Beach in order
to demonstrate the relative ineffectiveness, at least in our own period,
of Fielding's characteristically long, complex sentences and abstract
diction.12 Fielding also makes a number of appearances in that most
remarkable publishing phenomenon of 2003-2004-a best-selling
guide to punctuation!-Lynne Truss'sEats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. In one of them, a passage from
TomJones is offered to illustrate the unfortunate overuse of commas
in "noncontemporary writers," in whose writing "you can't help see-
ing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been
successfully corralled with the gate slammed shut by good old Comma
the Sheepdog."13 Let us take these three features of Fielding's style
identified for us by his appearances in composition texts, obvious and
superficial as they are-long and complex sentences; a heavy use of
punctuation marks;and a high incidence of abstractnouns-as points of
entry, considering them as potentially interesting features of embodied
or disembodied "voice."In what follows, we will concentrate primarily
on the first two of these features, which are distinct but closely related,
and touch at a few points on the third.
I have chosen as my second sample of Fielding's prose, from among
dozens or possibly hundreds of equally interesting candidates in Tom
Jones alone, a short chapter that appears early in the novel, Book
1, chapter 5. This chapter narrates the conversation and actions of
Allworthy's sister Bridget and his housekeeper Deborah on the morn-
ing after Allworthy has discovered the baby who will become Tom

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Jones, when he has presented the baby as "a Present" to his sister
and left the two women alone to discuss the baby who has been put
in their care.

When her Master was departed, Mrs. Deborah stood silent,

expecting her Cue from Miss Bridget; for as to what had past before
her Master, the prudent Housekeeper by no means relied upon it,
as she had often known the Sentiments of the Lady in her Brother's
Absence to differ greatly from those which she had expressed in his
Presence. Miss Bridget did not, however, suffer her to continue long
in this doubtful Situation;for having looked some time earnestly at the
Child, as it lay asleep in the Lap of Mrs. Deborah, the good Ladycould
not forbear giving it a hearty Kiss, at the same time declaring herself
wonderfullypleased with its Beauty and Innocence. Mrs. Deborah no
sooner observed this, than she fell to squeezing and kissing with as
great Raptures as sometimes inspire the sage Dame of forty and five
towards a youthful and vigorous Bridegroom, crying out in a shrill
Voice, 'O the dear little Creature, the dear, sweet, pretty Creature!
well, I vow, it is as fine a Boy as ever was seen!'
These Exclamationscontinued till they were interrupted by the
Lady, who now proceeded to execute the Commission given her by
her Brother, and gave Orders for providing all Necessaries for the
Child, appointinga very good Room in the House for his Nursery.Her
Orders were indeed so liberal, that had it been a Child of her own,
she could not have exceeded them; but lest the virtuous Reader may
condemn her for shewing too great Regard to a base-born Infant, to
which all Charityis condemned by Law as irreligious,we think proper
to observe, that she concluded the whole with saying, 'Since it was her
Brother'sWhim to adopt the little Brat, she supposed little Master
must be treated with great Tenderness; for her part, she could not
help thinking it was an Encouragement to Vice; but that she knew too
much of the Obstinacy of Mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous
Humours.'14

The chapter's opening paragraph, with its treatment of Deborah's

politic delay in responding to the baby until she can shape what she
expresses to her mistress's cues, calls attention to the social contexts of
speech, and particularlyto how they unfold within relations of power. In
Joseph Andrews, Fielding had exploited the same gap between personal
feeling and the strategic utterances of an underling in the extended
comic scenes between Lady Booby and Slipslop, her maid.'5 Here
the power relations that determine Deborah's speech to her mistress
are immediately conjoined with the power relations that determine
Bridget's own speech in the presence of her brother; and Fielding ironi-

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cally dignifies the hypocritical disparity between what Bridget says in
front of her brother and behind his back by treating it through a rather
abstract description of what Mrs. Deborah has observed. "The prudent
Housekeeper... had often known the Sentiments of the Lady in her
Brother's Absence"-not what she said, but the assumed abstraction
of her Sentiments themselves-"to differ greatly from those which she
had expressed in his Presence." In the course of its development, the
paragraph rises from the weighty tones of the narrator in its opening
sentences, and the ironic obliquity with which those sentences refer
to the insincerity of social speech, to the shrill vocal tones of Deborah
herself once she has received her cue, bursting out in rhapsodies over
the child whom she has called a stinking "misbegotten Wretch" in the
chapter before: "O the dear little Creature, the dear, sweet, pretty
Creature! well, I vow, it is as fine a Boy as ever was seen!" Here as
elsewhere in his novels, Fielding employs a dramatist's skill sparingly
but effectively to provide dialogue that reveals individual character,
directly or indirectly, in its forced or insincere registers as well as in
its expressive ones.16 One of the effects of the individual voices he
provides his characters is to throw into relief the distinctive qualities
of his narrator'sown.
In the prose of the sample I have quoted, we can easily see the
characteristics that are generally associated with Fielding's style. His
sentences here are indeed long-varying in this sample, for what it's
worth, from 35 to 114 words and averaging 59 words, as opposed to
an average of 28 words per sentence in an informal sample of D. A.
Miller's prose, or (to take another current author I have mentioned)
an average of 21 words per sentence in the prose of Lynne Truss.'7
Such long sentences, as we might expect, typically demand a lot of
punctuation. Furthermore, Fielding's punctuation practices (partly
idiosyncratic, partly reflecting standard practices of his time) create a
greater density of medial punctuation than would be typical of twen-
tieth-century prose: in this sample, on average, six commas and semi-
colons intervene between periods. These commas and semicolons, as
Truss's simile of the comma as a sheepdog and of gates clanging shut
suggests, serve to patrol the separations and relations among parts of
syntacticallycomplicated sentences, often creating a sense of a sentence
that falls into successive segments. We will consider this grammatical
and cognitive function of Fielding's heavy use of punctuation marks
shortly. But the punctuation marks in Fielding's prose serve another
function as well, which one feels especially in reading it aloud. Truss
herself calls attention to what she terms

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 the mixedoriginsof modernpunctuation,
andits consequentmingling
of two quite distinct functions:
1. To illuminate the grammarof a sentence
2. To point up-rather in the manner of musical notation-such
literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow.

In a brief summary of the long history of punctuation which draws on

the work of Robert Allen, M. B. Parkes, and others, Truss notes that
the earliest known punctuation, from around 200 B.C.,was in fact "a
three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at dif-
ferent heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in prepara-
tion" for verbal phrases of various lengths; and that, "for a millennium
and a half, punctuation's purpose was to guide actors, chanters and
readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses,
accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly
to look after itself."'s In its origins, then, the marks of punctuation,
themselves not voiced-empty of semantic content, conventional in
form, and mutely graphic as mere shapes on the page--were aimed
at the eventual rendering of the visual script by a voice. If they had
any sound at all themselves, it was from the first the anticipated sound
of breath.
For some of Fielding's works, of course, the effective rendering
of the punctuated written text by voices was an immediate practical
aim. Fielding not only began his literary career as a playwright but
also, as manager of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, oversaw the
production of a number of his plays; and the elaborate and idiosyn-
cratic punctuation employed in his play-texts seems designed to guide
actors in the pacing and manner of delivery of their lines. Although we
have little basis for judging the respective roles of author, transcriber,
or typesetter in determining the punctuation in the first editions of
Fielding's plays, the diversity of punctuation forms in those editions
suggests varied effects (pauses of various lengths, changes of pace,
phrasings within a sentence, trailings-off, interruptions or abrupt sus-
pensions of speech) that are lost in editions with modernized texts.19
When, in editing his The Author's Farce for an anthology that required
a modernized text, I agonized about how to replace, say, a six-hyphen
dash, or a two-hyphen dash followed immediately by a semicolon or
a colon, with a punctuation mark from our more restricted modern
repertoire, I found myself mentally "listening" to actors deliver the
lines of Fielding's play under the direction of his elaborate system of
punctuation, and then in a flatter and more evenly-paced manner in
response to the modern punctuation I had supplied.20
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 Compared to his practices in his plays, Fielding's punctuation in
his novels is less idiosyncratic to the modern eye, and it makes use far
less frequently of the dash. (Joseph Andrews does make memorable
use of dashes to mark "a Silence of two Minutes" and to set off the
narrator'slong aside when Lady Booby is struck dumb with astonish-
ment by Joseph's talk of his own virtue; and TomJones also includes
a few notable uses, as in the narration of Captain Blifil's death in the
very midst of planning how he will spend his future inheritance from
Allworthy: "In short, not to keep the Reader in long Suspence, just at
the very Instant when his Heart was exulting in Meditations on the
Happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy's Death, he
himself - - - died of an Apoplexy.")21But Fielding's habitually heavy
use of punctuation in his novels as well as his plays has a kind of dra-
matic function; though it may seem to a modern reader to interfere
with an easy, naturalized experience of his stylistic voice, stiffly en-
cumbering his sentences with a lot of nonverbal marks and constantly
interrupting the flow of his words, the notable role of punctuation in
his prose anticipates our mental if not actual hearing of it, breaths
and all. W. K. Wimsatt asserted in the introduction to his 1941 study
of Samuel Johnson's prose style, "Language is spoken before it is writ-
ten; even after it is written it is implicitly spoken .... Sound is in some
sense the medium of literature, no matter how words are considered
as expressive."22Since then, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the
logocentric speech/writing hierarchy, on the theoretical front of liter-
ary study, and more recently the flowering of "book history" and the
study of print culture, on its historical front, have unsettled Wimsatt's
assumption that sound is literature's essential form; but the double
function of punctuation as described by Parkes and Truss reminds us
of the interaction between visual and imagined or actual aural effects
in literature's printed texts.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of punctuation
emphasized its guiding role in a written text's return to the realm of
sound. The first treatment of punctuation published in English, the
1680 Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, And of Notes which are
used in Writing and in Print, provides a series of couplets dictating
the precise length of a reader's pause at a comma, semicolon, colon,
or full-stop:
A Commais a BreathingStop: No more,
Stop it while you may tell one, Therefore....
at
Where Semi-Colonplaced is; There you,
Mayplease to make a Stop, while you tell Two.

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 A Colon is a longer Stop;Therefore,
Stop at each Colon, while you may tell four.23

In his 1712 English Grammar, Michael Maittaire also provided a

formula for the relative length of pauses at the mark of a comma,
semicolon, and colon; and in his 1785 Essay on Punctuation, Joseph
Robertson reiterated the function of such punctuation marks in deter-
mining the length of pauses in reading aloud. Robertson goes beyond
the handy formulae of the others, however, to emphasize more strongly
the physical experiences of spoken language that punctuation serves to
remind us of in written texts. "An ingenious writer has observed," he
says, "that not half the pauses are found in printing, which are heard
in the pronunciation of a good reader or speaker; and that, if we would
read or speak well, we must pause, upon an average, at every fifth or
sixth word." Even "a simple sentence," he remarks, "when it is a long
one, may admit of a pause. For nature, which never separates the
agreeable from the truly useful, has annexed a pleasure to respiration,
which the hearer feels, as well as the speaker."24
"A pleasure [annexed by nature] to respiration, which the hearer
feels, as well as the speaker." This assertion of a natural pleasure in
respiration itself, which unites hearer and speaker, provides a suggestive
conclusion to Robertson's practical exposition of forty proper uses of
the comma in what is really the eighteenth-century equivalent of the
handbooks, such as Diana Hacker's Rulesfor Writers, commonly used
in composition and other English classes.25 It also returns us to the
question of the author's "embodiment" in prose style raised by Miller,
although it requires us to think of that embodiment in a different way:
as a process by which the materialization in textual marks of a writer's
mental hearing of an arrangement of verbal sounds provides the basis
for their eventual voicing, aloud or in imagined sounds, by another
body, the reader's-though the voice she is thus led to "sound" may
well be different from her own. I recognize that this formulation may
seem a gratuitously or even ludicrously baroque account of the most
basic functions of writing and reading (the communication of language
from one person to another via a system of visual marks);but it is aimed
at bringing out the somewhat miraculous nature of those functions,
and in particular the sensory dimension of them, rather than their
transmission of semantic content. Surely, that sensory and visceral
dimension is part of what we are trying to get at when we refer to an
author's "style"as something that is not simply identical with semantic
"meaning."But just as surely, we do not mean by "style"something that

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can be separated from meaning and scored, in quasi-musical notation,
as a pleasurable rhythm of intakes of breath. To return to the ques-
tion of Fielding's use of medial punctuation marks: those marks serve
simultaneously the two different functions of punctuation identified
by Truss-"[t]o illuminate the grammar of a sentence," and to help us
hear that sentence in a particular way-and it may be our experience
of those two functions together, as a sentence temporally unfolds, that
constitutes one apprehension of style.
A great deal could be said about how the complex syntactical struc-
turing of many of Fielding's sentences, as indicated and ordered by
punctuation marks, shapes our experience of reading his prose; but I
want to concentrate here on a few observations about examples from
the passages I have quoted that may modify some of the received wis-
dom I have thus far summarized on the effects of style. In the middle
of the second passage quoted, chapter 5 of Book 1 of TomJones, ap-
pears an extraordinarily long and syntactically complicated sentence:
the sentence in the second paragraph that begins "Her Orders were
indeed so liberal" includes 114 words and 11 clauses of various kinds, 7
in the sentence's main part and 4 in the indirect quotation of Bridget's
remarks. It would be a challenging task to diagram this compound-
complex sentence precisely. Without addressing its full complexity, I
want to point to the semicolon ("them;but") that articulates the division
between the two independent clauses of the non-quoted part of the
sentence, with their various attendant subordinate and relative clauses,
and propose that following this semicolon and the conjunction "but,"
the sentence uses its complicated and extended syntax to entertain and
enfold a perspective with a tenuous relation to the narrator'sown.
The dependent clause that opens this second part of the compound
sentence, projecting a hypothetical reader's response-"lest the vir-
tuous Reader may condemn her for shewing too great Regard to a
base-born Infant"-is further modified by a prepositional aside, "to
which all Charity is condemned by Law as irreligious." Martin Bat-
testin glosses this aside in a cautionary footnote: "Fielding's remark
appears to be ironical."26Battestin supports this tentative statement
about tone with contextual references to the language of the Poor Law
and of the Foundling Hospital's mission statement; but the context of
TomJones, and even of the individual sentence, itself suggests that the
aside about the irreligiousness of Charity to base-born infants, buried
as a syntactical branch off a branch at the sentence's center, cannot be
accepted as containing the narrator'sown views.

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 The word Charity, as critics have noticed, proves a contested key-
word in Tom Jones, as it was in Joseph Andrews; and by chapter 5
of Book 2, Fielding will provide a full-scale dramatic debate about
its meaning between Captain Blifil and Allworthy, in which Captain
Blifil's views are clearly hypocritical and self-serving. Within the long
sentence in which it appears back in chapter 5 of Book 1, the refer-
ence to a sanctimonious condemnation of Charity is introduced by
the pronoun "which"rather than "whom," signaling that the imagined
speaker holding this view understands the "base-born Infant" whom
this subordinate clause modifies as an animal or thing rather than as
a person. This reference to a hypothetical reader's disapproving views,
multiply subordinated by the syntax of its sentence, is eventually fol-
lowed in the same sentence by an indirect quotation of an individual
character's declared hypocrisy, as she calls the infant a "little Brat"
while stating her intention to treat him "with great Tenderness" to
appease her brother. The device of indirect quotation used in this case
embeds the speaker'swords syntactically in the narrator'sthird-person
formulation, bringing her just a little closer to the narrator'sposition
than the direct quotation of Deborah, for example, that concludes the
first paragraph of the same chapter.
In providing this rather laborious analysis of the configuration of
various mental states or views placed in relation to each other by the
elaborate syntax of Fielding's sentence, I have attempted to capture
at least part of what we experience as we move through the course of
that 114-word, 11-clause sentence. While I have spent about a page
(or roughly a minute and a half's reading time) commenting on the
sentence, it takes us only, say, about fifteen seconds to read silently or
thirty seconds to read aloud. Focusing on the articulation among its
syntactical parts, however, calls attention to the fact that we nonethe-
less do not take in the whole sentence instantaneously: our cognitive
understanding of its content, as well as our mental or actual hearing
of its pattern of pauses and sounds, takes place over a period of time.
What is happening in the course of those fifteen or thirty seconds is not
strictly our immersion in what cognitive linguists term the individual
writer's "mind-style," or what Ohmann identified for us as the writer's
"habit[s] of meaning" or the kind of "order"he or she habitually im-
poses on the "ephemeral pandemonium of experience," as conveyed
by the underlying matter of style. Instead, it is a disorienting move-
ment among the suspect "habit[s] of meaning" or "order[s]"imposed
upon experience by a variety of rapidly evoked hypothetical readers
or characters, existing at various levels of realization and brought

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fleetingly into being by the conjunction between writer and reader
sponsored by style.
These comments on one example, developed in terms of syntax and
the unfolding of a reading experience in time, accord generally with
the views of Fielding's style articulated powerfully by Robert Alter and
Henry Knight Miller in the 1960s and early 1970s (interestingly, before
the wide influence on English-language critics of Mikhail Bakhtin).27
They also resonate with what Ian Watt suggested in 1960 about Henry
James's style in his remarkable analysis of the first paragraph of The
Ambassadors. Through an incisive analysis of the syntax and diction
of that paragraph, which shows us just how far such close reading
can go, Watt arrives at the conclusion that the stylistic features of the
paragraph serve to sustain "the dual presence of Strether's conscious-
ness and of that of the narrator."The difficulty posed by this stylistic
achievement, Watt comments, is that "we often don't know whose
mental operations and evaluative judgments are involved in particular
cases"; the split perspective sustained by the formal features of James's
prose allows for irony, but Watt finally proposes that it is irony of an
open or positive" kind, as "the final balance is tipped in favour of
involvement, of ultimate commitment to the characters."28Fielding's
mode of evoking ironized perspectives through effects of style is
related to yet different from what Watt finds in James. It focuses far
less on the nuanced evocation of a particular character's psychology
and much more on the fluid and often fleeting suggestion of a variety
of points of view, some generalized and others given specific location
in an array of major or minor fictional characters. This crucial and
elusive effect of Fielding's prose may be what William Empson called
its "double irony"-its tendency to suggest simultaneously that it can
imaginatively encompass two perspectives and that it fully claims
neither.29 The larger interpretive significance of this feature of style
looks different now, after several decades of historicizing criticism and
of intent questioning of literature's ideological effects, from what it
did in 1958, 1967, or 1970.30 Its apprehension continues to depend,
nonetheless, on closely-observed acts of reading in time.
In Ohmann's "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style," he
added to his account of the ways that style conveys "epistemic choice,"
which I have summarized and then qualified in Fielding's case, a
more tentative and impressionistic evocation of a dimension of style
that we experience on the level of feeling rather than cognition. This
dimension derives directly from the temporal nature of the reading
process. Ohmann observes that a sentence begins by raising rather

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than answering questions, and that the incomplete utterance sets up
an emotional demand in the reader for completion:

Thesedemandsforcompletionof a sequenceareof coursesubverbal;

they are the vaguestsort of dissatisfaction
with suspendedthought,
with a rationalprocess not properlyconcluded.As the sentence
progressessomeof the demandsaresatisfied,othersdeferred,others
complicated,andmeanwhilenew ones arecreated.Butwiththe end
of the sentencecomesa kindof balancewhichresultsfromsomething
havingbeensaid .... Soprosebuildson the emotionalforceof coming
to know.31

Citing these observations from Ohmann's essay in her polemically-titled

book Grammar as Style, Virginia Tufte comments, "The indispensable
quality of prose that is met by the ear in reading, that must be heard as
passing sounds and stresses and ideas, that must be listened to as much
as understood, followed through as a sequence rather than grasped
whole as a structure: it is this quality that brings style and syntax closest
together."32Although Ohmann and Tufte both describe a dimension of
our reading experience of any prose style, that dimension is heightened
in Fielding's case by his style's characteristic employment of complex
syntax and long, sometimes very long, sentences, which sustain the
experience of suspended and then progressive knowing in a distinctive
way. Fielding's novels also powerfully link this sentence-to-sentence
experience of what Ohmann calls "the emotional force of coming to
know" with the larger temporal are of our incremental knowledge of
plot. Significantly, if you look back at the first main segment of the
sentence from Book 1, chapter 5, that we have examined at length, you
will find hidden in the furthest syntactic enclosure of a hypothetical
statement in a dependent clause interrupting a dependent clause an
oblique reference to what, seventeen books and nine hundred pages
later, will prove the most remarkable revelation of Tom Jones's plot:
while we learn in Book 1 that Bridget treats the infant, at her brother's
commission, as liberally as if he had "been a Child of her own," it is not
until Book 18, chapter 7, that we discover, with the sharp emotional
force of a long-deferred "coming to know," that he is.
Fielding's prose thus makes us feel, sentence-to-sentence as well
as chapter-to-chapter and book-to-book, our embodiment as readers,
our dependence on the temporal medium in which we move among
the successive syntactic pieces of a single sentence. As for the author
himself: where have we left him, between the alternatives of disem-
bodied impersonality or of thick-accented embodiment, variously at-

422 Fielding's Style

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tributed to the "voice" conjured by prose style? You will recall that in
D. A. Miller's colorful depiction of the "noisy personality" of Fielding's
narrative voice, he accused Fielding of"relentlessly humaniz[ing]" the
"divine" authority of the disembodied voice allowed to him by print.
The kind of temporal and imaginatively sensory nature of the reading
experience created for the reader by Fielding's prose style, which I
have been attempting to describe, seems far afield from Miller's point:
while never explicitly saying so, he seems to be thinking of the criti-
cal emphasis in recent decades on literature's alliance with ideology
and social power, and to reject the sound of Fielding's prose voice as
too susceptible to that critique, too ill-designed for transcending the
suspect features of social identity in its characteristic intonations. I
have been arguing that Fielding's prose style does not aim to empty
out or transcend human personhood, in all its physical and socially-
determined specificity. Instead, it uses the medium of its temporal
and aural unfolding to activate one person's voice through another's,
in the separate acts of reading that occur across historical time. His
formulation of a hope for the immortality of TomJones imagines that it
might be multiply timely rather than "timeless." Similarly,the syntactic
complexities of his style serve to suspend various ways of ordering
experience beside each other, never free from the particularities of
human personhood but sometimes evoking more than one person's
point of view, within a single sentence's capacious span.
As D. A. Miller opens the final chapter of his book on "the secret
of style," he harks back to his colorful sketch of the stylistic voices of
Fielding and Thackeray to imagine the embodiment of literary critics,
past and present, as well. "Picture if you can," he asks, "apast moment
of literary criticism when, institutionally empowered and rewarded,
close reading was the critic's chief tool of professional advancement;
his command of a text, his capacity to tease from it a previously invis-
ible nuance, or illuminate it under a fresh insight, would as good as
light the pipe in his mouth and sew elbow patches on his jacket, so
unfailingly did he thus distinguish himself as the compleat, the full
professor of English Literature." This figure, seeking to get "as close
as one can get" to a beloved literary text, "to identify and combine
with it," instead finds himself irredeemably embodied in his own intel-
lectual and social era, inescapably dressed in the period costume of
a type (like Fielding and Thackeray speaking in the "thick accent[s]"
of a "sociolect" and seated on institutional "chair[s]"). His costume is
now of a passing era; he has become, in Miller's fancy, "antiquated and
rambling, but not--alas for his pride!-too deaf to hear the resounding

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impatience of his audience that he get to the point, to the paradigm."
Not that Miller wants to renounce close reading; "it is close reading
in its humbled, futile, 'minoritized' state that would win my prefer-
ence," he protests.33 Must the discipline of literary studies itself be
"minoritized," in his view-separated from institutional and cultural
power-as Austen must be disembodied, floating free of social identity
and therefore power, to achieve innocence, ingenuousness, "Style"?
The daunting intellectual challenge for literary study of the coming
decades might instead, though with difficulty, be embraced. That is,
to affirm the vitality and usefulness of literary study in a changing
world, with our own sometimes humiliating mixture of marginality
and guilty power; seeking to understand the relations among the dif-
ferent activities ("close reading," reading for pleasure, historicizing
and ideological analysis, the teaching of writing, the editing of texts)
that literary study has over the years and in different byways of the
profession entailed.

The epigraph to this essay presents the opening paragraph of Book

13 of TomJones, in which Fielding honors his dead wife and anticipates
his own death. Consider now the complicated syntax of the sentence
at the center of that paragraph, in which Fielding wishes for the liter-
ary afterlife he has found: "Foretel me that some tender Maid, whose
Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when, under the fictitious Name
of Sophia, she reads the real Worth which once existed in my Char-
lotte, shall, from her sympathetic Breast, send forth the heaving Sigh."
Twenty-four words and several branching syntactic segments separate
the subject, "some tender Maid," and the predicate of this sentence's
primary dependent clause. In the syntactic diversions that intervene,
the sentence rocks back and forth both across time-backward from
the maid to her grandmother and then forward with the revelation
that that grandmother is herself yet unborn, part of the "hereafter"
stretching away from the writer's own time-rocking also between fic-
tion and life-from the historical Charlotte to the fictional Sophia to
the real but as yet nonexistent future reader. It is that imagined reader's
audible, heaving Sigh, a sound of respiration and of feeling, that knits
together these disparate moments in real history and in reading time,
bringing Fielding's thought, for the moment, to a close.
Yale University

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 NOTES
I am grateful to Robert J. Griffin, Langdon Hammer, Jeffrey Nunokawa, and Katie
Trumpener for their generous comments on a draft of this essay.
1 Etienne Balibar and Pierre
Macherey, "On Literature as an Ideological Form," trans.
Ian McLeod, John Whitehead, and Ann Wordsworth, in Untying the Text:A Post-Struc-
turalist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 86.
2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 95; Timothy

Peltason calls attention to the "minimizing references to 'fine points' and to 'stylistic
finish'" in this sentence of Said's discussion, and argues that, despite Said's explicit
insistence on the need to read the novel carefully in literary terms, the general effect
of his essay is subtly to discourage "the practice of critical reading" in the context of
ideological analysis ("The Place of Reading: Graduate Education and the Literature
Classroom," ADE Bulletin 113 [1996]: 11-12). As president of MLA, however, Said
argued strongly for the enduring importance of careful reading and literary-critical
skills (see, for example, his "Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism,"
PMLA 15 [2000]: 285-91); in a keynote address of 2000 he focused on style's capacity
to suspend together disparate moods ("Reflections on Late Style," Modernist Studies
Association meeting, October 2000).
3 George Levine, "Putting the 'Literature' Back into Literature Departments," ADE
Bulletin 113 (1996): 15, 18. For other relevant discussions, see Peltason; and Denis
Donoghue, "The Practice of Reading,"in What's Happened to the Humanities?, ed. Alvin
Kernan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). A debate about the rise of ideological
analysis in literary criticism was played out with a focus on Fielding, in particular, in
the September 1996 issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; the
volume Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David H. Richter
(Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1999) later issued from this debate.
4 The deleterious "gulf between research and teaching in literature and research
and teaching in composition" was powerfully posed in 1983 by Winifred Bryan Horner
(Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1983], 1). For a more recent forum on the changing state of composition research
and instruction, see Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change,
ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois Univ. Press, 1996).
D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
.
2003), 7, 96 n. 2, 56, 75.
6 D. A. Miller, 31-32.

7Wayne C. Booth, "Telling as Showing: Dramatized Narrators, Reliable and Unreli-

able," chap. 8 of The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), 94-96.
Booth's view of the narrator as a central character of Tom Jones was widely accepted
by other critics in the decades following. In 1967 Robert Alter commented, "Fielding
uses a self-dramatizing narrator who in a sense is, as some readers have suggested,
his most fully realized character" ("Fielding and the Uses of Style," Novel 1 [1967],
reprinted in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin
[Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968], 104); and in 1970 Henry Knight Miller
observed, "I suppose that these days one can argue that Henry Fielding is the 'real'
hero of Tom Jones without fluttering many dovecotes" ("The Voices of Henry Field-
ing: Style in Tom Jones," The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa,
ed. Henry Knight Miller, Eric Rothstein, and G. S. Rousseau [Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1970], 262).

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 8 George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, "Le style, c'est l'homme mnlme,"quoted from a
collection of definitions on style by Louis Tonko Milic ("Metaphysics in the Criticism
of Style," College Composition and Communication [October, 1966]) in Virginia Tufte,
Grammar as Style (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 4. Also quoted in
William K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1941; reprint, 1963), 1 n. 6. Wimsatt makes the point that Buffon's formulation,
"Style is simply the order and movement one gives to one's thoughts" (An Address
Delivered Before the French Academy, 1753), rather than "the too-often-quoted 'The
style is the man,' is Buffon's real definition of style" (1, 1 n. 6).
9 J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1922;
reprint, 1960), 21.
10Richard M. Ohmann, "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style," in Style in
Prose Fiction: English Institute Essays, 1958, ed. with a foreword by Harold C. Martin
(New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), 13-14, 19. Related recent approaches to style
have been influenced by the field of cognitive linguistics. For a summary of approaches
to written style as a manifestation of"mind style" (a "distinctive linguistic presentation
of an individual mental self"), see Jean Boase-Beier, "Mind Style Translated," Style
37 (2003): 253-63. Boase-Beier particularly emphasizes the contributions of Roger
Fowler (Linguistics and the Novel [London: Methuen, 1977] and Linguistic Criticism
[Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]) and notes the distinction maintained by this ap-
proach between "the actual author of a particular work and the invented narrator or
character in the work whose cognitive state is represented" (263).
" D. A.
Miller, 1.
12 Ohmann, "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language," in Politics of Letters
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987), 247-48. Ohmann's essay trenchantly
questions the consistent promotion in composition textbooks of "definite, specific,
concrete" reference over the employment of abstractions (one of the features flagged
as undesirable in Fielding's prose).
13Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
(New York: Gotham Books, Penguin, 2004), 79-80.
14 Henry Fielding, The History of TomJones, a Foundling, ed. Battestin and Fredson

Bowers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975), 45-46 (Book 1, chap. 5).
15In Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), I focussed on the place of verbal echo in these comic
scenes, arguing that Slipslop's echoes of her mistress's words allow for resistance as
well as compliance in their exchanges (91-94).
16 Henry Knight Miller comments: "Dialogue is the traditional resource of the
comic dramatist; and Fielding (in Tom Jones) ranks easily with Plautus and Terence,
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as a master of dialogue and of the comic characters given
body by that means" ("Voices of Henry Fielding," 262-63).
17 These averages derive from informal and unscientific samplings but do reflect
some general differences in typical sentence length. Wimsatt compares several studies
of Samuel Johnson's average sentence-lengths, citing numbers ranging from 44.03 to
51.4 within the Ramblers alone (63-64 and 63 n).
I8sTruss, 70-72. M. B. Parkes names the two major functions of punctuation as "gram-
matical" and "rhetorical." Citing Cicero and Quintilian, he emphasizes the rhetorical
function of distinctiones (the system of punctus at different heights on the line) as an
early system of punctuation for orators and readers-aloud, rather than specifically for
actors; and he places the shift to a largely grammatical function in silent reading at a

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much earlier point than does Truss (Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History
of Punctuation in the West [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993], 1-4, 65-70). See
also Robert Allen, Punctuation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); Nicholson Baker,
"The History of Punctuation," in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (New
York:Random House, 1996); and Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of
Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997).
19 Fielding's concern with punctuation is evident, however, in the alterations he un-

dertook to the second edition of his sister Sarah's novel, David Simple. I am grateful
to Linda Bree for bringing this point to my attention.
20 See my edition of Fielding's The Author's Farce, in The Broadview Anthology of

Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Maja-
Lisa von Sneidern (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001).
21 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Battestin, intro. Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan
Univ. Press, 1967), 40 (Book 1, chap. 8); Tom Jones, 109 (Book 2, chap. 8).
22Wimsatt, 5.
23 Anonymous, A Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, And of Notes which are used

in Writing and in Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each
to be carefully taught (London: "Printed for the Authors Use in his School," 1680);
facsimile edition, English Linguistics, 1500-1800, ed. R. C. Alston, no. 65 (Menston,
England: Scolar Press, 1968), 4-5.
24 Michael Maittaire, The English Grammar: or, an Essay on the Art of Grammar,

Applied to and Exemplified in the English Tongue (London, 1712); facsimile edition,
English Linguistics, 1500-1800, ed. R. C. Alston, no. 6 (Menston, England: Scolar
Press, 1967), 201. Joseph Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation (London, 1785), 75;
see also 77, 89, 91, 103, 116, 129.
25 Diana Hacker's phenomenally popular (and I assume profitable) handbook comes
in a variety of forms, shorter and longer, spiral-bound for easy reference or in standard
binding for library use, etc. I have used several editions of both her A Pocket Style
Manual and Rules for Writers: A Brief Handbook, now in its 5th edition (Boston:
Bedford, St. Martin's Press, 2004), in teaching writing skills.
26 See Battestin's edition of Tom Jones, 46 n.
27 See Alter; and Henry Knight Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1961) and "The Voices of Henry Fielding." In the latter, drawing
on Leonard Lutwack's treatment of "Mixed and Uniform Prose Styles in the Novel"
(JAAC 18 [1960]: 350-57), Miller argues that Fielding's "mixed style" is "a compound
of many voices; and, essentially, the art of the many-voiced in narrative is the art of
prosopopoeia, of reproducing or 'counterfeiting' modes of speech" (267, 267 n).
28 Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors," originally published in

Essays in Criticism 10 (1960), 250; reprinted in full in Henry James, A Collection

of Critical Essays, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1994), 126-27, 131.
"29William Empson, "TomJones," The Kenyon Review 20 (1958): 217-59; reprinted
(as revised by the author) in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald
Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), 124-26.
*
My own work on Fielding has concentrated on his often contradictory engagements
in the historical concerns of his time, as evidenced in the complexities of his literary
voice. In "Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century," I concluded that "the ways that
Fielding strikes us as enmeshed in history, and the ways that historical change involves
him, frequently, in contradictions, do not seem, however, to silence him, as they often

Jill Campbell 427

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do [Amelia's]Booth. Sometimescacophonously,alwaysenergetically,Fielding'svoice,
at mid-century,issues forth"(The ColumbiaHistory of the British Novel, ed. John
Richetti [New York:ColumbiaUniv.Press, 1994], 125).
31 Ohmann,"Prologomena," 22-23.
32 Tufte, 7-9.

33 D. A. Miller,57-58.

428 Fielding's Style

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