ABSTRACT
This chapter confronts P.J. de Loutherbourg’s drawings of selected scenes from Tom Jones with the possible “Gothic” content in Henry Fielding’s novel. Commenting on Fielding’s pictorialism, it argues that the most suitable scene from Tom Jones would have been the actual Gothic mansion of Mr Allworthy, but the scene does not attract the illustrator’s attention. The chapter discusses de Loutherbourg’s patterns of Gothicising the selected scenes, which in the original depend on the mock-heroic or the grotesque. It concludes with raising more general questions about the paradigms of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation in the late eighteenth century.
