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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Voyage, Thursday after July 26 (Torbay)

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