Talk to Tom Jones like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Tom Jones is the life story of a foundling — discovered as an infant in the bed of the generous Squire Allworthy — who grows up handsome, warm-hearted, impulsive, and perpetually in trouble. Tom is good in the deepest sense but bad at the appearance of goodness: he drinks, fights, and sleeps with women who are not Sophia Western, the neighboring squire's daughter and the love of his life. Sophia is pursued by the odious Blifil (Tom's rival and Allworthy's legitimate heir), and much of the novel is a chase — Tom expelled from his home and wandering toward London, Sophia fleeing a forced marriage, both being deceived and manipulated by a cast of hypocrites, schemers, and self-interested opportunists.
Fielding's central argument is that prudence — performing virtue correctly — is not the same as virtue itself, and that the novel's true villains are the people who manage appearances without the underlying goodness. Blifil is prudent, respectable, and fundamentally corrupt. Tom is imprudent, scandalous, and genuinely good. The comedy is largely about a society that cannot tell the difference, and the reader's pleasure is in knowing better than the novel's respectable characters do.
What it gets right
- 1.
Fielding's central distinction is between prudence (the management of appearances) and virtue (actual goodness of heart). Blifil has the former without the latter; Tom has the latter without the former. The novel insists this difference is everything.
- 2.
The narrator is a character in his own right — opinionated, digressive, ironic — and the essay-chapters opening each book are Fielding doing literary theory inside a novel. This was unprecedented in 1749.
- 3.
Sophia Western is one of the eighteenth century's most fully realized female characters: intelligent, principled, and clear-eyed about what she wants, which puts her at odds with nearly every institution around her.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English novelist, playwright, and magistrate who wrote some of the most influential prose fiction of the eighteenth century. He began as a playwright, was forced out of the theatre by the Licensing Act of 1737, and turned to novel writing. Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742) were parodies of Samuel Richardson's Pamela. Tom Jones (1749) is his masterpiece and one of the founding texts of the English novel. He also co-founded the Bow Street Runners, a proto-police force, and published a landmark report on the causes of London's crime. He died at forty-seven in Lisbon.
