His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

This line comes from Henry Fielding’s comic novel *The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling* (1749), a work famous for its intrusive narrator and satirical commentary on “honor,” marriage, and social hypocrisy in Georgian England. Fielding repeatedly exposes how respectable language can disguise predatory motives, especially in courtship plots where marriage functions as an economic transaction. The remark is delivered in the narrator’s characteristic ironic voice, puncturing the period’s conventional praise of “honorable intentions” by redefining them as socially sanctioned fortune-hunting. It reflects Fielding’s broader critique of a society in which legal and moral respectability can coexist with exploitation.

Fielding uses sharp irony to show how the word “honorable” can be emptied of moral content and reduced to a social label. The speaker pretends to accept the conventional phrase—“strictly honorable, as the phrase is”—only to reveal that the “honor” in question is merely the respectable mechanism of marriage used to obtain a woman’s money. The sting lies in the contrast between the lofty term and the blunt verb “rob,” implying that exploitation can be made palatable when wrapped in approved institutions. The line critiques mercenary marriage and the way polite society normalizes coercion and greed when they appear in proper form.