Journal Article

“That Little Insignificant Fellow, Tom Thumb”: Henry Fielding’s Early Burlesque and the Origins of Jane Austen’s Style

Peterson, Lesley

2024

Overview

Margaret Anne Doody argues that both Tom Jonesand an earlier Fielding novel, Joseph Andrews, “are in an immediate relation to ‘Henry and Eliza,’ which picks up a number of plot points and thematic developments from them (not excluding Fielding’s own brand of irony)” (xxix). Whether the diminutive hero was undertaken by Jane, her younger brother Charles, one of George Austen’s younger pupils, or someone else, Jane Austen was evidently impressed enough by Fielding’s script and immersed enough in its language to fill the pages of Volume the First with exuberant and outrageous works that not only show how congenial she must have found Fielding’s burlesque style but also recall Fielding’s Tom Thumb in several particulars, including place names, plot elements, characters, and rhetorical strategies. In the eighteenth century, as Dr. Johnson tells us, burlesque referred to a type of satire that ridicules its targets in a “Jocular” manner, “tending to raise laughter” by means of “unnatural or unsuitable language or images.” A more recent definition of literary burlesque specifies that it achieves comic incongruity either by treating a serious subject in a nonserious manner or by treating a trivial subject in a serious manner, either way mixing high with low (Abrams and Harpham 37). Yet in Austen’s early novels we are just as likely to find her treating serious matters with unserious language, as in this comic epitaph in “Frederic and Eliza” for Charlotte Drummond, who commits suicide when she realizes that she has agreed to marry two different men:

• Publisher: Jane Austen Society of North America
• Subject: Austen, Jane (1775-1817) / Burlesque / Diminutives and augmentatives / English literature / Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) / Laughter / Literary characters / Motion pictures / Novels / Opera