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 as the author of four such works, which he preferred to call not novels (a term associated in his day with mere catchpenny romances) but "histories," "biographies," or "comic epic-poems in prose." Three of these works, each differing in form and spirit from the others, have become classics of our literature--Joseph Andrews (1742), Jonathan Wild (in Miscellanies, 1743), and Amelia (1751); the fourth, Tom Jones, is justly ranked among the dozen or so greatest novels ever written.

Borrowing E. M. Forster's metaphor representing the novel as a sort of sprawling and richly variegated country, one can say that Fielding was a pioneer in uncharted regions. He was the first...