The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

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"The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" is a 1749 novel by Henry Fielding. It has been hailed as one of the great comic novels of English literature and Fielding’s masterpiece. The novel is divided into eighteen books and aims to explore human nature, covering a wide variety of social themes and literary styles. A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire—though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" is one of the most ambitious comic novels in English literature.

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(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) For Coleridge the plot of Tom Jones was, along with that of Oedipus The King, the most perfect ever constructed. Fielding used all his art and all the craft he had amassed as a successful playwright for the eighteenth-century London stage to tell this hugely entertaining story of a foundling and how he arrives, through sexual misadventures and elaborate disasters, to claim his legitimacy, his fortune, and his true love.