Tom Jones

"People love Tom Jones because it’s hilarious. It’s the great mid-century novel. It’s intimidatingly long, but it’s another page-turner. It’s about an illegitimate foundling called Tom Jones, who gets adopted by the lovely, benevolent Squire Allworthy. Tom has a heart of gold, but he’s a total ne’er do well, and he’s always getting himself into scrapes. He has an evil half-brother called Blifil and one of the great tensions of the novel is, will Blifil’s misdeeds be discovered? Is Tom or Blifil going to end up with the upper hand? Tom is constantly taking lovers. He’s irresistible to women, especially older women. There’s a society woman in London who takes him on, so he’s a kept man. At one point, it seems he is in a love affair with his own mother, though she turns out not to be. Meanwhile, he declares his passionate devotion to Sophia Western, a neighbouring squire’s daughter, who is the heroine of the novel. Sophia is a delightful creature based on Fielding’s wife, who died before the novel was written. In pursuit of Sophia, and in Tom’s attempts to flee his home after he’s thrown out for drunken debauchery, he travels around England. So it’s a peripatetic novel that shows us England in the mid-century. The novel itself is really fun, but what’s fascinating about it is this depiction of England in flux in the middle of the 18th century. There is a huge amount of forced migration from land enclosures, from the European wars, and from the Jacobite rebellions that are going on. There are gypsies—Romani travelers from Central Europe—in the novel, there are vagrants and beggars. We have this full picture of the ways in which property and vagrancy law and international wars were creating this highly volatile social fabric in England. Plus there are lots of brilliant jokes about food…The book opens with a long riff about how authors are like restaurateurs serving up meals to fussy, discontented customers, who if they don’t like what they’re given to eat will “damn their dinner without control.” He sounds like someone complaining now about the comments they get on social media—Fielding was very ahead of his time."

"Tom Jones by Henry Fielding was published in 1749. At nearly 350,000 words, it is quite a brick of a book. In the 271 years since its publication, it has not aged, nor been surpassed. It is the easiest read in the world, the perfect boy-meets-girl story, a romcom-come-social satire set in Hanoverian England, Hogarth set to words. No wonder it has been turned into numerous films and formed the basis of no less than three different operas. The hero of the book, Tom, is a foundling (bastard) who is brought up by the kindly and judicious Squire Allworthy. Tom is good natured, kind and honourable, but also hot-headed, impetuous and randy. As if that weren’t enough to deal with, other characters, jealous of Allworthy’s affections for Tom, conspire to do him down. Tom has to leave home and gets flung by fate into all kinds of scrapes and, indeed, at one point, prison. Tom loves Sophia Western, the daughter of Allworthy’s Somerset neighbour, Squire Western. Sophia loves Tom. But it seems impossible that they can be together, given Tom’s illegitimate status. Misunderstanding and mistaken identities abound. It wouldn’t be fair to give any more of the plot away, except to say that the name Sophia means ‘wisdom’, and that this is a tale about a young man who is fundamentally good, but not always wise. Can he put that right? This is one of the very few books I have ever read that is literally unputdownable. I stopped reading occasionally to eat and sleep, but that was all. —Ben King, History & Economics Editor"