Tom Jones

In brief

A baby is found in the bed of a rich, kind Somerset squire. He is raised as a gentleman’s ward beside the squire’s nephew, grows up generous, reckless and in love with the neighbour’s daughter, and is thrown out of the house on the strength of his own follies and his cousin’s lies. He takes the road to London, and so, separately, does she. Eighteen books later every secret about his birth has come out, the cousin is exposed, and the foundling marries the girl.

That is the plot of a romance, and Fielding knew it. What makes The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling more than a romance is the voice telling it: a learned, sociable, opinionated narrator who stops the story to argue with critics, explain his methods and warn his readers, and who is always weighing his characters’ hearts against their conduct. The book is a comedy about a good man who keeps behaving badly, and an inquiry into why goodness is not enough.

The argument

Fielding announces his subject in the first chapter, which he calls a “bill of fare” for the reader. “The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature” (1.1). Tom is the test case. He sells his horse and then his Bible to feed a gamekeeper’s starving family (3.8); he also gets drunk on the day his benefactor recovers from illness and goes into a thicket with Molly Seagrim the same evening.

The book’s claim is that Tom’s faults are real but superficial, and that what matters most is the disposition underneath, which Fielding calls good nature. Against it he sets every system that tries to make people good by rule. Tom’s two tutors make the point in miniature: Thwackum the divine, for whom human nature is depraved and grace is everything, and Square the philosopher, for whom virtue is a matter of the eternal fitness of things. Both are hypocrites, and both prefer the smooth Blifil, who has learned to say the right things, to the honest Tom (3.5).

But the novel does not simply excuse its hero. Early in Book III the narrator turns to the reader and states the moral Tom will spend the book learning: “Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men” (3.7). Tom’s ruin comes not from his vices but from his carelessness, and Blifil’s long success comes from knowing exactly what an action will look like. The final books, in which Tom sits in prison believing he may have slept with his own mother, are the hardest lesson prudence could give. He comes out of it chastened, and the last chapter says he has “acquired a discretion and prudence very uncommon in one of his lively parts” (18.13). The happy ending is earned by that change, not just by the discovery of his birth.

The shape of the book

The novel is in eighteen books, and its architecture is the most admired thing about it. The first six are set in Somerset, at Allworthy’s house of Paradise Hall and Squire Western’s estate next door, and run from Tom’s birth to his expulsion (6.11). The middle six are the road: soldiers, a barber who turns out to be Partridge, the long interpolated tale of the Man of the Hill (8.11), and the inns of the Midlands. The last six are London, a world of masquerades, lodgings, debts and duels.

At the centre stands the inn at Upton, in Books IX and X. In one night Tom rescues Mrs Waters and sleeps with her, an Irish husband bursts in looking for his runaway wife, Sophia arrives on her way to London, hears from Partridge where Tom is, and leaves her muff on his empty bed with her name pinned to it (10.5), and her father arrives hard behind her.

Time is handled with the same deliberation. The book headings measure it out: Book IV covers a year, Book IX “twelve hours”, Book XIII “the space of twelve days”. The narrator claims the right to do this: he is “the founder of a new province of writing”, and so “at liberty to make what laws I please therein” (2.1). The plot is full of coincidences, but they are prepared: a pocket-book, a letter, a name mentioned in passing in Book I turns out to bear the weight of the ending. The discovery that Mrs Waters was once Jenny Jones (18.2), and then that Tom’s mother was Allworthy’s sister Bridget (18.7), rereads everything from the first chapters.

The voice

Each of the eighteen books opens with an essay, and in these chapters Fielding talks to the reader about criticism, love, the marvellous, plagiarism and the art of the novel itself. But they are the frame that makes the book work. The narrator is a host at a table, a guide on a journey, and a judge who explains his reasoning.

The style is mock-heroic when it wants to be. When Molly Seagrim fights the village women in the churchyard, the scene is “sung by the muse in the Homerican style” (4.8), with epic similes and a catalogue of casualties. When Sophia is first described, the narrator works himself up into a hymn that ends “the lovely Sophia comes!” (4.2). The comedy of exposure is just as exact: when a rug falls in Molly’s bedroom, it reveals “the philosopher Square, in a posture ... as ridiculous as can possibly be conceived” (5.5). The tutor of reason is behind the curtain with the gamekeeper’s daughter.

Good nature and its enemies

The novel’s moral world turns on the difference between appearance and disposition. Blifil never puts a foot wrong in public. As a boy he frees the songbird Tom gave Sophia, on the principle that it is wrong to keep a creature captive, and the bird is promptly killed by a hawk (4.3). His worst act is silence. Bridget, dying, sent a letter by the lawyer Dowling to tell Allworthy who Tom really was; Blifil took it and kept it (18.8).

Tom’s virtues show in the same places that his faults do. He takes a flogging rather than betray Black George, who was poaching with him; he spares a highwayman who tries to rob him, and gives him money when the man pleads a starving family (12.14); in London he persuades his friend Nightingale to keep faith with the pregnant Nancy Miller. These acts come back to him. The highwayman turns out to be Mrs Miller’s cousin, and Mrs Miller becomes the advocate who pleads Tom’s case to Allworthy.

His low point is in London. Lady Bellaston takes him as a lover and pays his expenses, and he accepts. He gets out of the affair by a trick, on Nightingale’s advice: he writes her a proposal of marriage, because Nightingale assures him she will break off at once if a lover talks of marrying her (15.9). The letter later reaches Sophia. It is a measure of the book’s honesty that its hero is, for a time, a kept man, and that Fielding neither hides it nor makes it the end of him.

The people

Brave, kind, impulsive and easily tempted, with no talent for concealment. He is not a rake: his lapses come from appetite and gratitude, never from design. Fielding makes him likeable without making him admirable, and asks the reader to tell the difference.

Sophia Western

The heroine is braver than the hero. She refuses the marriage her father tries to force on her, runs away from home with her maid rather than marry Blifil, and rides for London. She loves Tom from the start, but she will not marry him until she believes he has changed, and she says so. Fielding’s first wife, Charlotte Cradock, who died in 1744, is generally taken to be her model.

Allworthy and Western

Two squires, two kinds of father. Allworthy is just, generous and easily deceived; his goodness lacks exactly the worldly judgement the novel recommends, and he is the last to see through Blifil. Western is loud, drunken, devoted to hunting and to his daughter, and a tyrant when crossed. He gives up the pursuit of his runaway daughter the moment he hears a pack of hounds (12.2).

Partridge

The schoolmaster ruined in Book II on suspicion of being Tom’s father, who reappears as a barber and attaches himself to Tom in hope of getting back into Allworthy’s favour. He is cowardly, superstitious, loyal and a fount of mangled Latin. His visit to see Garrick as Hamlet is the funniest scene in the book: terrified by the ghost, he then dismisses Garrick’s acting, “He the best player! ... why, I could act as well as he myself” (16.5), because Garrick behaved just as any man would on seeing a ghost.

Blifil, Thwackum and Square

The book’s three hypocrites. Blifil learns from both tutors to dress self-interest in principle; Thwackum flogs in the name of grace, Square excuses himself in the name of nature. Square repents on his deathbed and writes to clear Tom (18.4); Thwackum never does.

The world outside

The road novel runs through real history. In Book VII Tom falls in with a company of soldiers marching north against the Jacobite rebels, under the expectation of being commanded by the Duke of Cumberland (7.11). The rising of 1745 is under way: Western’s household drinks to “the king over the water”, Partridge assumes Tom must be off to join the rebels, and at an inn beyond Upton the landlord takes Sophia for Jenny Cameron, the Pretender’s supposed mistress (11.2). Fielding himself was a committed Hanoverian who wrote two anti-Jacobite papers in these years, The True Patriot and The Jacobite’s Journal, and he gives the Jacobite sympathies to his comic figures.

The rest of England is there too: inns and their landladies, justices of the peace who judge by whim, debtors’ prisons, the London marriage market, the gap between what the law says and what money buys. Fielding was a lawyer and became a magistrate while finishing the book, and his eye for how the system treats the poor, as with the trial of Partridge (2.6) or the treatment of Molly, is sharp beneath the comedy.

How it was made

Fielding was born in 1707 at Sharpham Park in Somerset, the county where the novel begins. He made his name as a playwright of political satire until the Licensing Act of 1737, widely seen as a response to his plays, closed that career. He trained for the law, and came to the novel through Samuel Richardson: Shamela (1741) is a parody of Pamela, and Joseph Andrews (1742) begins as one before becoming something of its own, which he called a “comic epic poem in prose”. Tom Jones was written over several years in the mid-1740s, through the death of his first wife and the Jacobite rising, and dedicated to his patron George Lyttelton. In the dedication he declares that “to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history”. Allworthy is usually said to draw on Lyttelton and on Ralph Allen of Bath.

Andrew Millar published it in six volumes on 28 February 1749. By then Fielding had been appointed a magistrate for Westminster, and in the same year, with his half-brother John, he set up the Bow Street Runners, London’s first professional force of thief-takers. He wrote one more novel, Amelia (1751), and died in Lisbon in 1754, where he had gone for his health.

Readers and critics

The book sold fast and shocked many readers. Richardson detested it, and so did Samuel Johnson, who preferred Richardson and, according to Boswell, said the difference between them was that between a man “who knew how a watch was made” and one who could only “tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate”. The charge, that Fielding stayed on the surface of character, has never quite gone away. Coleridge answered it from the other side, naming Tom Jones with Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist as the “three most perfect plots ever planned”. Thackeray, writing in the preface to Pendennis (1850), regretted that since Fielding no English novelist had been allowed to show a man as freely as he had.

Twentieth-century criticism kept the argument alive. F. R. Leavis left Fielding out of his “great tradition” of the English novel. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) set Richardson’s close psychological realism against Fielding’s realism of judgement, the narrator’s wide, ironic assessment of motive and society, and treated the two as the founding alternatives of the form.

Afterlives

François-André Philidor made it a French comic opera in 1765, and Edward German an English one in 1907. Tony Richardson’s 1963 film, written by John Osborne and starring Albert Finney, Susannah York and Hugh Griffith, won the Oscar for Best Picture; its wordless eating scene between Finney and Joyce Redman’s Mrs Waters turned the Upton chapter into one of the best-known seductions in cinema. The BBC made a serial in 1997, with Max Beesley as Tom and Samantha Morton as Sophia, and ITV another in 2023. The novel’s real descendants are on the shelf: the intrusive, companionable narrator passes through Sterne to Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot.

How to read it

Read the essays. The first chapter of each book is where the narrator sets his terms. Skip them and the novel becomes a long romp; read them and it becomes an argument.
Keep a list of small things. A pocket-book, a muff, a letter, the name of the woman who was blamed in Book I. Fielding plants everything; the pleasure of the ending is seeing it all come up.
Read Books IX and X in one go. The night at Upton is a farce of entrances and exits and the hinge of the whole design.
Judge Tom twice. Once by what he does and once by why he does it. The narrator is asking you to see that the two verdicts differ.

Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742). Shorter and looser, with Parson Adams, the best of his good-hearted innocents.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748). The great rival published the year before: a tragedy of virtue told from inside, in letters.
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–15). The book Fielding modelled his comic road on.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67). The talking narrator taken to the limit, a decade later.
Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48). Fielding’s ironic, worldly narrator in Victorian London, with a heroine who has all the prudence Tom lacks.