The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

Summary

The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon is Henry Fielding's record of the last journey of his life. By the spring of 1754 the novelist and Westminster magistrate was suffering, in his own words, from 'a jaundice, a dropsy, and an asthma'. His abdomen had been tapped three times, and he was so wasted that he had to be hoisted aboard ship in a chair. His physicians agreed that a warmer climate offered the only chance of surviving another winter, and when no ship could be found for Provence, Lisbon was chosen. The voyage was meant to take a few days; contrary winds stretched it from 26 June to early August. Fielding died at Lisbon on 8 October 1754, and the Journal was published in 1755 'for the benefit of his family'. The book has three parts. A Preface argues that a voyage-writer should be a historian, not a romancer, and confesses that Fielding would have loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in prose. An Introduction recounts how, already sick, Fielding broke up the street-robbery gangs of 1753 at the Duke of Newcastle's request, then passed through the hands of Mr. Ranby, 'Mr. Ward', Bishop Berkeley's tar-water and the surgeon's trochar. The journal proper runs day by day from the morning he took leave of his children at Fordhook, through weeks at anchor in the Thames, the Downs, off Ryde on the Isle of Wight and in Torbay, to the arrival in the Tagus. Little happens in the usual sense. The ship waits for wind. The captain, a brave, irascible old seaman, rages, softens, and once falls on his knees to beg pardon when Fielding threatens to go ashore and sue. Mrs. Fielding suffers toothache that no tooth-drawer at Wapping, Gravesend or Deal can cure. A Ryde landlady, Mrs. Francis, overcharges them for everything. A kitten falls overboard and is rescued by the boatswain. Around these events Fielding writes essays on the London fish trade, the manners of watermen and innkeepers, the meaning of a 'pitiful' sum of money, and the cruelty of the sailors who jeered at a dying man as he was carried to the boat. What gives the Journal its value is the voice. The magistrate still notices exactions and incivility, the comic novelist still turns an innkeeper into a character, and the sick man reports his tappings with a surgeon's exactness and almost no self-pity. He admits that the parting from his children unmanned him in spite of all the philosophy he had learned 'to bear pains and to despise death', and he forgives the captain at once. Read beside Tom Jones and Amelia, the Journal shows the same moral observer under the pressure of mortality, and it offers students a rare first-person account of eighteenth-century illness and medicine from the patient's side.

Plot or Argument

• Preface: the voyage-writer as historian

  Fielding complains that most travel books are either dull or fabulous, separates the Odyssey and Telemachus (romance) from Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon (history), and promises a true narrative of ordinary things, admitting that the reader may find it tedious.

• Introduction: the magistrate's last campaign and the patient's decline

  In August 1753, sent toward Bath by the surgeon Ranby, Fielding is called instead by the Duke of Newcastle to propose a plan against the street-robbery gangs; he carries it out through the winter and claims success. Then come a deep jaundice, dropsy and asthma, the care of 'Mr. Ward', three tappings, a trial of Berkeley's tar-water, and the decision to seek a warm climate at Lisbon.

• Rotherhithe to the Downs: delays, jeering watermen and a toothache

  From 26 June Fielding is carried aboard through rows of mocking sailors, waits days for the captain to clear the ship, is tapped again by Mr. Hunter on 28 June, and watches his wife suffer toothache that tooth-drawers at Wapping, Gravesend and Deal fail to relieve.

• Becalmed off Ryde: the Francis household

  Contrary winds hold the ship off the Isle of Wight for more than a week. Fielding goes ashore and records the lodging-house kept by Mrs. Francis and her farmer husband, whose bills, bad temper and lack of mutton become the journal's longest comic set-piece.

• Torbay and the captain's submission

  Weather-bound again, Fielding buys Southam cider and feasts on John Dory, which prompts a mock-serious essay on London fishmongers. A quarrel over the passage money ends with the captain on his knees after Fielding threatens to quit the ship and go to law; Fielding forgives him at once and disclaims praise for it. A fourth tapping is performed by a local surgeon while the anchor is weighed.

• Biscay, Cape Roca and the Tagus

  With a fair wind the ship crosses the Bay of Biscay, sights the Rock of Lisbon, and anchors before the city. Customs formalities and a sleeping providore delay landing; Fielding is driven through the city to a supper on a hill above the Tagus and ends with lines from Virgil and Horace.

Characters

• Henry Fielding, narrator and patient

  Novelist and former Bow Street magistrate, aged forty-seven, unable to walk, recording his voyage with a lawyer's eye for injustice and a comedian's eye for character.

• The captain, master of the ship

  An old seaman, unnamed in the text, by turns blustering and tender: he swears at his passengers, mourns a drowned kitten, reads prayers on deck, and kneels to beg pardon when threatened with the law.

• Fielding's wife, companion and nurse

  Praised as behaving 'more like a heroine and philosopher' at the parting; she suffers severe toothache through much of the voyage and manages the household ashore.

• Mr. Welch, friend and fellow magistrate

  Saunders Welch, a Westminster high constable and justice whom Fielding names with affection; he helps carry Fielding aboard and leaves at Gravesend.

• Mrs. Francis, landlady at Ryde

  A sharp-voiced lodging-house keeper whose overcharging and contrariness Fielding turns into a comic portrait of petty extortion.

• Mr. Hunter, surgeon

  'The great surgeon and anatomist of Covent-garden', who taps Fielding before the ship leaves the Thames while the young ship's surgeon watches as a student.

• Mr. Ward, medical adviser

  The patient's medicine-maker in the Introduction, whose diaphoretics fail to work on Fielding and who first advises tapping; Fielding thanks him for treating him without fee.

Lessons

• Patience that is not indifference

  Fielding was trained, as he says, in the school that teaches men to bear pains and despise death, yet the parting from his children undoes him. The Journal does not pretend that stoic doctrine removes grief; it shows a man submitting to grief and then going on with courtesy and wit. Students can compare stoic endurance with Christian patience, which allows sorrow while trusting God.

  • Why does Fielding say Nature 'made as great a fool' of him at the parting as of any woman? Is he ashamed of it?
  • Where in the voyage does his patience seem strongest, and where does it break?
  • How is Christian patience in suffering different from the philosophical school he names?

• Small tyrannies and the magistrate's eye

  Pilots, watermen, customs officers, landladies and providores all exercise a little power over a helpless passenger. Fielding, who had spent years judging cases of theft and fraud, notices each abuse and asks what law or custom allows it. The lesson is that justice is tested in petty dealings as well as in courts.

  • Which of the petty tyrants in the Journal seems to Fielding the worst, and why?
  • Is Fielding fair to Mrs. Francis, or is his comic portrait itself a kind of revenge?
  • What does the episode of the jeering sailors suggest about cruelty toward the sick?

• The captain on his knees: forgiveness without triumph

  When the captain kneels, Fielding forgives him at once and refuses praise for doing so. He does not hide that he too lost his temper. The scene offers a model of reconciliation in which the stronger party declines to humiliate the weaker.

  • What brings the captain to his knees, and why does Fielding call his posture 'a little too abjectly' adopted?
  • Why does Fielding 'utterly disclaim all praise' for forgiving him?
  • How does the captain's tenderness to the kitten complicate our view of him?

• A patient's history of eighteenth-century medicine

  The Introduction is one of the clearest lay accounts of how a gentleman of 1753-54 was treated: a proprietary gout medicine, a royal surgeon's advice to take the waters, a celebrated medicine-seller's sweats, repeated paracentesis, laudanum, and a bishop's tar-water. Fielding records doses, quantities and effects without claiming medical authority.

  • List the remedies Fielding tries. Which did he think helped, and on what evidence?
  • Why does Fielding treat Berkeley's tar-water seriously even though Berkeley was not a physician?
  • What does the Journal show about the relationship between patients and medical men before modern licensing?

Context

Fielding sailed in 1754, the year after his campaign against London street-robbery and two years after he had given up the Covent-Garden Journal. His half-brother John was taking over the Bow Street office. Britain's trade with Portugal was large, so a merchant ship bound for Lisbon was easy to find, and Lisbon had a resident English community and an English burial ground. The city Fielding describes is the Lisbon that the earthquake of November 1755 destroyed a year after his death.

Composition

Fielding kept the journal during the voyage and finished the Introduction and Preface at or before arrival; it breaks off as he lands. It was published by Andrew Millar early in 1755 in two versions: one shorter, with passages on the captain and others softened or removed, and a fuller text later reprinted by Arthur Murphy in his 1762 Works. Austin Dobson's separate edition of 1892 studied the relation between the two. The library text is Project Gutenberg #1146, which follows the fuller Murphy text with Saintsbury's introduction.

Reception

Early readers valued the Journal chiefly as a memorial of Fielding's character, and Saintsbury's introduction, included in the Gutenberg text, calls it the main source for Fielding 'dans son naturel'. Later critics have read it as an early example of the personal travel narrative and as a document of the eighteenth-century sickroom. It is often printed with the unfinished fragment answering Bolingbroke.

Comparisons

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  Tom Jones's narrator is a confident guide steering a comic plot to a happy end; the Journal's narrator cannot steer anything, not even his ship, and the voyage has no plot beyond survival. The same habits of digression and moral observation survive the change.

• Amelia

  Amelia (1751) was the novel of Fielding's magistracy, full of prisons, bailiffs and London poverty. The Journal's Introduction continues that concern, describing his last plan against the street gangs and the cost of being an honest justice.

• The Odyssey

  Fielding's Preface names the Odyssey as the head of a kind of writing he means not to imitate, preferring true history to fable. Odysseus's homecoming is the poem's end; Fielding's voyage is outward toward a foreign grave, though he could not know it.

• The Life of Samuel Johnson

  Boswell records Johnson's last illnesses from outside; the Journal gives a contemporary's dropsy from inside. Both show eighteenth-century men of letters meeting physicians, remedies and death with faith, humour and some fear.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Preface's distinction between romance and true history. Ask whether the journal that follows is the 'true history' Fielding promises or something more artful.
• The Introduction's two stories running side by side: the magistrate's plan against the street-robbers, and the patient's decline through jaundice, dropsy and asthma.
• The parting from the children at Fordhook on 26 June and the jeering of the watermen the same afternoon. Notice how Fielding moves from private grief to public reflection.
• The captain in every mood: blustering on 27 June, grieving the kitten in July, kneeling for pardon at Torbay, reading prayers on deck near the end.
• The long Ryde chapter on Mrs. Francis. Watch how Fielding builds a comic character out of bills, mutton and tea, as he did with innkeepers in Tom Jones.

Key terms and names

Dropsy

The eighteenth-century name for an abnormal collection of fluid in the body; Fielding's abdominal dropsy had to be drained repeatedly.

Tapping (paracentesis)

Drawing off fluid from the abdomen through a hollow instrument called a trochar; Fielding undergoes it four times in the book.

Tar-water

An infusion of pine tar in water promoted by Bishop George Berkeley in Siris (1744) as a near-universal remedy; Fielding tries it in May 1754.

Providore

Fielding's word for the Lisbon port official who had to license passengers to land; he sleeps through the afternoon while Fielding waits.

The Downs

The sheltered anchorage off Deal in Kent where outward-bound ships waited for a fair wind.

Voyage-writer

Fielding's term in the Preface for an author of travel narratives, whom he would hold to the standard of a historian.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Fielding choose Lisbon, and what had he tried first?
2. Comprehension What happens when Fielding is carried from his coach to the ship at Rotherhithe?
3. Comprehension Why does the captain fall on his knees off Torbay, and how does Fielding respond?
4. Interpretation Fielding tells the story of his anti-robbery plan in the Introduction to a travel book. Why might a dying man want that story told?
5. Interpretation Is the Journal more a portrait of Fielding or of the people around him? Choose one episode to argue your answer.
6. Interpretation How does Fielding's humour about his own body (for example, Ward's 'deal board') shape the reader's response to his illness?
7. Big Question What does it look like to keep one's duties of justice, courtesy and family care when one knows one may be dying?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 90:12 (Scripture)

  Fielding begins the voyage believing he may be leaving his children for the last time; the Journal is a long exercise in numbering one's days.

• 2 Corinthians 4:16 (Scripture)

  Paul's 'though our outward man perish' fits a writer whose body is wasting while his attention to others stays sharp.

• Matthew 18:21-22 (Scripture)

  The captain's kneeling and Fielding's immediate forgiveness can be read against the command to forgive without keeping count.

• Seneca, Moral Letters (on bearing illness) (Great Conversation)

  Fielding names 'that philosophical school where I had learned to bear pains and to despise death'; students can compare his practice with stoic teaching.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In the Preface Fielding argues that a travel narrative should instruct and entertain by telling the truth about ordinary things. The journal itself argues by example that a sick man's account of delays, quarrels and remedies can show both the follies of a nation and the character of the writer.

Rhetorical device: mock-heroic understatement. The kitten's fall overboard is called 'a most tragical incident', and the captain resolves to 'bear it like' a man before returning to backgammon with the friar.

Debate: Resolved: That the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon shows more fortitude than bitterness.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Fielding says a voyage-writer should be a historian, not a poet. Using the Preface and two journal entries, explain what kind of truth the Journal tells and whether it is more than a record of facts.

Comparison with The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling: Compare an inn or innkeeper in Tom Jones with Mrs. Francis at Ryde. What has changed when the comic observer is himself the helpless guest?

Medical Lens

The Journal is a patient's narrative of terminal illness in the 1750s. Fielding names his conditions as gout (treated with 'the duke of Portland's medicine'), jaundice, dropsy and asthma, and he gives quantities for each paracentesis (fourteen quarts, then thirteen, then ten aboard ship). Readers have proposed cirrhosis of the liver as the underlying disease; that is a retrospective reading, not something the text or his doctors state. The Introduction shows the mixed medical marketplace of the time: John Ranby, the king's sergeant-surgeon; the celebrated proprietary-medicine maker 'Mr. Ward' (generally identified as Joshua Ward); laudanum after the second tapping; and Bishop Berkeley's tar-water, which Fielding treats with respect while doubting any universal panacea. The voyage adds a dentist-surgeon distinction at Gravesend, a young ship's surgeon who has never seen a tapping, and a neighbouring surgeon who taps him again while the anchor is weighed.

• Introduction, opening (August 1753)

  Gout relieved by the Duke of Portland's medicine; Ranby advises Bath; Fielding, lame and ill, undertakes the street-robbery plan instead.

  Physicians Doctors Pain
• Introduction (autumn-winter 1753)

  Jaundice, dropsy and asthma together in a body that had lost its muscular flesh; Fielding gives up his Bath lodgings as hopeless.

  Death Dying Pain
• Introduction (February-May 1754)

  Under Ward's care he is tapped of fourteen quarts and nearly dies; Ward's sweating medicines fail; a second tapping is eased by laudanum.

  Surgery Quackery Charlatans Opium Laudanum
• Introduction (May 1754)

  Fielding rereads Berkeley's treatise on tar-water, tries a milk diet and then tar-water, and records improved appetite but continued swelling before a third tapping.

  Quackery Charlatans Physicians Doctors
• The Voyage, June 26

  Carried aboard unable to use his limbs, Fielding is jeered by sailors and watermen and reflects on cruelty toward the visibly sick.

  Disability Deformity
• The Voyage, June 28

  Mr. Hunter taps ten quarts before departure; the ship's young surgeon, who had never seen the operation, attends as a student.

  Surgery Physicians Doctors
• The Voyage, June 30-July 2

  Mrs. Fielding's toothache: a female tooth-drawer at Wapping, a Gravesend surgeon who declines to pull a rotten tooth, and a Deal surgeon who also fails; Fielding comments on the separation of surgeons from barbers.

  Surgery Pain
• The Voyage, Thursday after July 26 (Torbay)

  A fourth tapping by a neighbouring surgeon, performed in haste while the sailors weigh anchor.

  Surgery

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a two-column table of every delay in the voyage and its cause (wind, custom, law, temper). Then decide which delays were within any person's control.

• Fiction

  Retell the kitten's rescue from the point of view of the boatswain, keeping to the facts Fielding gives.

• Essay

  Fielding claims a travel writer should be a historian, not a romancer. Using the Mrs. Francis episode, argue whether he keeps his own rule.

Further Reading

• Amelia, Henry Fielding

  Fielding's last novel (1751), drawn from his magistrate's experience.

• An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, Henry Fielding

  His 1751 pamphlet on crime and policing, background to the Introduction.

• Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, George Berkeley

  The 1744 treatise Fielding rereads in the Introduction.

• The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Henry Fielding, ed. Tom Keymer

  Modern annotated edition (1996) with both 1755 versions discussed.

• Henry Fielding: A Life, Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin

  Detailed account of Fielding's last illness, voyage and death at Lisbon.