Read this if you…
- want the first truly great english Novel
- like a narrator who steps aside from the story to philosophize to the reader
- love a great plot
Skip this if you…
- hate an intrusive narrator
- don't want a super long book
Why It Matters
Fielding pretty much invented the comic novel in English: a big, generous, messy story about a good-hearted man stumbling through a corrupt world. The book's self-aware narrator, who keeps breaking in to talk about storytelling itself, pioneered tricks novelists still use. Coleridge called it one of the three most perfect plots ever planned.
The 
Take
Insanely well done, so many great comical asides and mini comments on human nature or society or whatever. Maybe drags on a little in the middle but I forgive fielding. Definitely the first WOAH novel in English
The lineage through The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling built on it. - *Tom Jones* is Fielding's English answer to *Don Quixote* — he admired Cervantes openly and set out to copy him - He'd already declared the debt on the title page of *Joseph Andrews* ("in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes"); here it shows in the Jones/Partridge travel pairing, modeled directly on Quixote and Sancho - Read the Don first and the comic-epic shape — the rogue's progress, the master-and-servant double act — arrives already familiar
- The Iliad by Homer. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling built on it. - The mock-epic only works because the real epic is so familiar — and Fielding names Homer (with Aristotle) as his model - The churchyard brawl and the Mrs. Partridge episode are *Iliad* battle-scenes in disguise, narrated with Homer's own extended similes - Knowing how Homer pitches a duel between heroes is what makes Fielding's grand treatment of a village fistfight land as comedy
- The Odyssey by Homer. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling built on it. - *Tom Jones* is built on the *Odyssey* by design — Fielding theorized the novel as a 'comic epic poem in prose' and named Homer as his license - Tom is a modern, comic Odysseus, wandering toward home across an 18-book epic frame; the structure echoes Fénelon's *Télémaque*, a prose continuation of Homer - Read the *Odyssey* first and the whole shape of Fielding's road — the detours, the homecoming — shows its ancient skeleton
- The Aeneid by Virgil. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling built on it. - The epic frame Fielding is grafting onto a foundling's story — Tom's journey to his true home is plotted as an Aeneid-style homecoming - Fielding borrows Virgil's one-year time-scheme and scatters Virgilian tags and Muse-invocations throughout - Knowing the *Aeneid* lets you catch the joke and the ambition at once — Fielding is claiming epic stature for the comic novel
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling shaped it. - Fielding's sprawling, generous comic novel is the picaresque tradition Dickens consciously wrote *David Copperfield* into - The homage was personal: while writing the novel, Dickens named his newborn son Henry Fielding Dickens - *Tom Jones* even turns up inside the story — David lists it among his dead father's books, "a glorious host, to keep me company"
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling shaped it. - Fielding's chatty, intrusive narrator — stepping out from behind the story to comment, judge, and steer — is the model Thackeray inherited a century later for *Vanity Fair* - Thackeray venerated him publicly, devoting part of his 1853 lectures on *The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century* to Fielding - But *Vanity Fair* is also an argument with *Tom Jones*: Thackeray subtitled his book "A Novel Without a Hero" precisely because he thought Fielding's flawed foundling was no one to admire
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling shaped it. - The novel Austen grew up inside — her family read *Tom Jones* aloud, and her teenage burlesque *Henry and Eliza* lifts Fielding's foundling heroine and indulgent narrator wholesale - Fielding invented the warm, ironic, godlike narrator who arranges his characters' fates and winks at the reader — the voice *Pride and Prejudice* perfects - His tight comic plotting, where every accident pays off by the last chapter, is the engine Austen inherited and refined into something quieter and sharper
Depicted in Art
Tom Jones and Molly Seagrim in an attic encounter; the philosopher Square hides in the curtains in a nightgown, with a dog by the bed.
William Ward, 1787
Plate from Book XII, chapter II of Fielding's novel — one of Gravelot's full-page illustrations for the 1750 French edition.
Hubert-François Gravelot, 1750
Tom binds Northerton's hands behind his back with the garter the ensign had meant to strangle Mrs Waters with; she half-clothed beside them in the woods.
Hubert-François Gravelot, 1750
Tom Jones recognises the barber 'Little Benjamin' as his old schoolmaster Partridge — Book VIII, chapter IV.
George Henry Townsend, 1895
Sophia Western on her flight to London, plate from Book XI of Fielding's novel.
Hubert-François Gravelot, 1750
Tom and the pregnant Molly Seagrim fend off attackers with bones and other improvised weapons in a Gothic churchyard.
Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1775
Sophia Western tumbles from her horse on the road to London; her petticoats fly up as Tom Jones reaches to help her.
Thomas Rowlandson, 1792
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2005
Keymer and Wakely's Penguin is the standard modern Tom Jones. The introduction on Fielding's comic engineering, the chapter prefaces, the omniscient narrator, makes sense of why this is the novel that taught the novel how to work.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.”
“The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature.”