What is Tom Jones about?

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.

At eighteen books across almost nine hundred pages, Tom Jones is a very long novel — but Fielding designed it for pleasure rather than edification. The digressive narrator is one of literature's great company: opinionated, ironic, sometimes infuriating, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to address "the reader" directly. Each of the eighteen books opens with an essay-chapter in which the narrator discusses his craft, human nature, critics, and the purpose of writing. This metafictional layer was entirely novel in 1749 and influenced every self-conscious narrator since.

Tom Jones is a challenging choice for contemporary readers unfamiliar with the eighteenth-century novel, primarily because of its length and the expectation of patience with discursive prose. But those who give it the sustained reading it demands will find a novel of unusual warmth, genuine comic invention, and a philosophically serious case that moral character matters more than moral performance — a case the twenty-first century could use.