Fielding’s prepositional, textual inns

Abstract

Abstract As the Narrator in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) explains: “Those little Spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place.” An inn is a prepositional sort of building: it is between here and there; one travels to or from it; it links villages and towns and cities; it is on the road and on the way. Inns became increasingly important in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscapes, depending commercially on their architectural uniqueness, even eccentricity. This essay examines the ways in which Fielding’s textual structures borrow the architectural as well as syntactical grammar of inns as part of a distinctly modern effort (in the words of the landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon) to “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (1806). From chapter headings, tables of contents, and spatial descriptions, on the one hand, to the shapes of syntax, paragraph, and plot, on the other, Fielding’s novels generate fresh perspectives from the act of reading.