The complete online text of History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding.

The English author and magistrate Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was one of the great novelists of the 18th century. His fiction, plays, essays, and legal pamphlets show he was a humane and witty man, with a passion for reform and justice. The English novel...

There are many ways, many forms, in which novelists attempt to give their readers what Henry Fielding in Tom Jones (1749) refers to as "a Representation, or, as Aristotle calls it, an Imitation of what really exists. . . ." Fielding is best remembered to...

There are many ways, many forms, in which novelists attempt to give their readers what Henry Fielding in Tom Jones (1749) refers to as "a Representation, or, as Aristotle calls it, an Imitation of what really exists...." Fielding is best remembered today...

The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling by Henry Fielding Henry Fielding was born in 1707 into a family with aristocratic connections. His father, Edmund, had ancestors who were earls, and his mother, Sarah, was daughter of the judge Sir Henry Gould....

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on February 28, 1749, Tom Jones is arguably one of the first prose works describable as a...

Author Henry Fielding's book 'The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling' features a scene in which the protagonist Tom, his servant named Partridge and some other characters attend a performance of the Shakespearean play 'Hamlet.' A close examination of the book indicates that the...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man possessed of tight white breeches and riding boots will have a big impact on the female population. And now, only three months after Mr Darcy gave Lizzy Bennet a last smouldering look...

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1968 and reprinted in 1995, Battestin, one of Fielding's most important modern biographers and critics, examines Fielding's treatment of the virtues of prudence and wisdom in Tom Jones. Battestin focuses on the character of Sophia, arguing that the novel's heroine and protagonit's love interest both embodies and portrays an idealized representation of Fielding's complex moral vision.

In the following chapter from her book Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Kraft examines the way in which authorial narrative interrupts and replaces the representation of the characters' consciousness in Tom Jones.