Tom Jones Book 14, Chapter 1

An Essay to Prove That an Author Will Write the Better for Having Some Knowledge of the Subject on Which He Writes

• In this day and age, some writers have been able to get famous without a solid education in literature behind them.
• The narrator thinks this is terrible.
• After all, why should writing be different from any other craft, which you have to study hard to perfect?
• The narrator speculates that one reason why no English writers have written really well about upper-class life in particular is that none of them know anything about it.
• After all, you can't find the true upper class in coffeehouses or on the street.
• So where are you supposed to observe them?
• You can only see the upper classes if you have lots of money and high birth.
• And people with these two things rarely take to writing.
• But honestly, true knowledge of the upper class is not actually helpful to a comedy writer like Fielding.
• Life at the top is mostly made up of people sticking strictly to good form.
• Their days are mostly made up of "dressing and cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtseying" (14.1.11).
• It's among the lower classes that you see real variety.
• Well, there are people even among the upper classes who give in to passion.
• Lady Bellaston is such a woman.
• But Lady Bellaston is an exception to current trends: the idea that people in modern high society are super lustfulis wrong.
• It's not that people are having more love affairs than in the past.
• Rather, nowadays, people are totally focused on stuff like the social and financial positions of their partners.
• Things like love and passion are actually pretty unfashionable.