Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Summary
A baby is found in the bed of Squire Allworthy, the most decent landowner in Somerset, who raises the foundling as his own. Tom grows into the warmest hearted and least prudent young man in the county, in love with Sophia Western next door and unable to stay out of trouble with anyone else. Schemed against by his half brother Blifil, a masterpiece of respectable malice, Tom is banished, and the middle of the novel takes to the road: inns, brawls, soldiers marching against the Jacobite rising of 1745, and a gallery of hypocrites, before everything converges on London, where Tom sinks nearly to ruin before the secret of his birth surfaces and puts everything right.
Fielding organised the book into eighteen parts, each opening with an essay in which the author talks directly to you, about writing, criticism, hypocrisy, whatever the road has brought to mind. Readers either love this narrator or endure him; those who love him have one of the great companions in English fiction. The machinery underneath is extraordinary either way. Coleridge ranked the plot among the three most perfect ever planned, alongside Oedipus Rex and Jonson's Alchemist, and the claim survives inspection: hundreds of pages of apparent coincidence resolve like clockwork.
It is long, cheerful, worldly and forgiving, a book whose deepest conviction is that goodness and respectability are different things. Published in February 1749, it sold through four editions in its first year while moralists denounced it, which would have struck Fielding as the system working.
Historical Context & Significance
The novel was attacked on publication for lowness, for its frankness about sex and for making a fornicator its hero; it was also an immediate bestseller, and the two facts together are a fair picture of its era. Fielding, a magistrate as well as a novelist, threaded the 1745 Jacobite rising through the road chapters, so the book doubles as a portrait of England in a nervous year.
Its standing as one of the foundations of the English novel has never really lapsed. Ian Watt treated it as the great counterexample to Richardson, realism of assessment against realism of the inner life. The 1963 film with Albert Finney won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and sent the book back up the bestseller lists two centuries after publication, and adaptations have kept coming, most recently a 2023 television series.