Seldom does one reach the end of a 900-page novel and wish it had been longer, but that was my experience on first reading Henry Fielding’s classic from the early days of the novel, officially entitled The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, though generally known simply as Tom Jones. The book, originally published in 1749, was what Fielding would have called a “comic epic in prose,” as he had characterized his previous novel Joseph Andrews—written, as he would have noted, in the manner of Don Quixote (rather than in what he considered the sentimental, moralizing, and tediously didactic style of his contemporary in the burgeoning novel genre, Samuel Richardson). Indeed, the 900 pages of Tom Jones surely seems a walk in the park compared with the 1500 page slog of Richardson’s Clarissa. But Fielding’s rejection and parody of Richardson in his first two novels (Shamela and Joseph Andrews) involved a rejection of Richardson’s bourgeois morality, and his picaresque protagonist Tom Jones engages in a number of sexually explicit encounters.
Thus Fielding’s novel came in for some moralistic backlash in its own day. No less a literary critic than Samuel Johnson condemned the novel, largely on account of its morality: In her memoirs, Hannah More (a poet and playwright in Johnson’s circle), wrote that “I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once, and his displeasure did him so much honor that I loved him the better for it. I alluded rather flippantly, I fear, to some witty passage in Tom Jones: he replied, ‘I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.’” And she went on to note how Johnson followed up by heaping praise upon Richardson in contrast.
The great critic of the next literary generation, however—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—was of the opposite opinion: In his brief “Notes on Tom Jones” from 1813, Coleridge noted that in Fielding “There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” And in the posthumous 1835 book Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great Romantic poet is quoted as saying “What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May.”
It is Coleridge’s opinion (of Fielding at least) that has proved the lasting one. And Fielding himself, probably with Richardson in mind, excuses his occasional lapses into “immorality” thus:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
For me, of course, the novel is one of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” as I am including it here as number 32, alphabetically (you will notice when I get to the “R’s” that there is no Richardson there). And I am not alone: Besides Coleridge naming it as one of the three most perfect plots in all literature, the acclaimed novelist Somerset Maugham in 1948 named Tom Jones as the earliest of his “ten greatest novels in the world.” It was ranked as 77th on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 100 Novels, and was included in the National Book Awards’ 2006 list of “100 Life-Changing Books” (as voted on by National Book Award winners). It also appears on the Guardian’s list of the “100 Greatest Novels in English” and on the Observer’s list of the “100 Greatest Novels of All Time,” and it comes in as number 22 on the BBC’s list of “100 Greatest British Novels.” (It must be admitted that Richardson’s Clarissa also can be found on the Guardian and the Observer list, and comes in as number 16 on the BBC list, but not mine. I’m going with Coleridge.)
Fielding divides his novel into three volumes, each containing six books. Volume one is set in and around the estates of Squire Allworthy and Squire Western in rural Somersteshire, and end in Tom Jones’ expulsion from his Paradise (indeed Allworthy’s estate is actually called “Paradise Hall”). Volume two sees Tom on the road to London, and volume three sees the action brought to a close in the great city. T o give you a taste of Fielding’s “most perfect plot”—and I can only give you a taste because I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t actually read the book—let me provide a summary of the novel’s exposition and initiating actions: The wealthy Squire Allworthy (and none of Fielding’s names are random) lives on a great estate in Somerset with his sister Bridget. One day the squire returns from a trip to London to find a newborn baby lying on his bed. A young neighborhood servant named Jenny Jones is thought to be the boy’s mother, and upon being confronted, she admits to having placed the boy in Allworthy’s bed, but refuses to name the child’s father. The squire takes the child in and asks Bridget to raise him, naming him Thomas Jones.
Bridget soon marries Captain Blifil, who fathers a boy with Bridget who becomes known as “Master Blifil.” The father soon dies of apoplexy, and Tom and Blifil are raised like brothers, though Tom is kind, honest, and lusty while Blifil is jealous and hypocritical. Tom finds a willing participant in his youthful passions in the gamekeeper’s daughter Molly, but he finds she has other lovers, and then falls truly in love with Sophia Western, daughter of Allworthy’s neighbor, Squire Western. Though Sophia returns Tom’s love, both squires are against the match because of Tom’s illegitimate status.
A serious turning point occurs when Allworthy grows ill and, believing he is dying, prepares to leave a good chunk of his estate to Tom, which angers Blifil (the legitimate heir). When Tom learns that Allworthy has recovered his health, he gets drunk in celebration, but Blifil spreads the story that while the squire was on his deathbed, Tom was getting drunk in anticipation of Allworthy’s death. This leads to Tom’s banishment from Allworthy’s estate, and to his picaresque wanderings for much of the remainder of the novel. It also leads to the expectation that Sophia will marry Blifil, a fate she cannot abide, nor can we as readers, and she, too, flees Somerset.
Much of what follows in volume two seems episodic, as picaresque novels tend to be, but in Fielding’s hands things do come together unexpectedly in the third volume, set in London where all the principles come together once more. That’s the perfection of Fielding’s plot. Some character who seemed a minor player six hundred pages earlier reappears with information that proves But there is much more to Tom Jones than a rollicking good story. For one thing, as should already be clear, the novel satirizes the pretensions of the gentry and the assumptions about class in mid-eighteenth century England. As a bastard, Tom is assumed to be as base as he is base-born, and the narrator tells us “it was the universal opinion of all Mr. Allworthy’s family that he was certainly born to be hanged.” Yet Tom is a pillar of virtue compared with many of the novel’s upper class characters. Tom’s frank admission that “I have been guilty with women, I own it; but I am not conscious that I have ever injured any—nor would I, to procure pleasure to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being” is admirable in its honesty and its Christian charity in a way one does not see in the often hypocritical values of Fielding’s society. We see this early on in the novel, when the two tutors Allworthy has hired to educate Jones and Master Blifil—the avaricious clergyman Thwackum and the hypocritical philosopher Square—extol the virtue of “justice” over Allworth’s tendency toward mercy. Tom’s great rival Blifil justifies his own selfish designs likewise:
“Blifil was so desirous of the match that he intended to deceive Sophia, by pretending love to her; and to deceive her father and his own uncle, by pretending he was beloved by her. In doing this he availed himself of the piety of Thwackum, who held, that if the end proposed was religious (as surely matrimony is), it mattered not how wicked were the means. As to other occasions, he used to apply the philosophy of Square, which taught, that the end was immaterial, so that the means were fair and consistent with moral rectitude.”
This is one of the things that make Tom Jones a very modern, even post-modern, novel. Despite the fact that Fielding’s cast of characters is drawn from every branch and level of eighteenth century British society, and is set against the backdrop of the Jacobite uprising of 1745, these are characters—virtuous, flawed, repentant, villainous or hypocritical—that we still recognize and, with the novel’s narrator, laugh at.
What makes it seem much less contemporary is the very Fieldingesque narrator, who knows everything and will often address the reader, commenting on the action of the novel. But this in itself is an interesting experience. One learns to think of the narrator as a friend and companion through the story. The novel is divided into 18 books (six books per volume), and each book begins with prefatory comments by the narrator who, conscious that he is working in a new genre that he himself is helping to shape, will often comment on his own narrative technique. In the preface to the first book, he announces that his purpose in writing is to “explore human nature.” In his preface to book two, he makes the astonishing claim that “I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make whatever laws I please therein.” Nor does he grant that any critics of his time have any right to judge his work. At one point he tells us:
Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any further together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever; and here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs or works which no ways concern them; for till they produce the authority by which they are constituted judges, I shall not plead to their jurisdiction.
How can such brashness not be entertaining? But there is an irony and a playfulness in the narrator’s voice that draws constant attention to the way he is telling his story that makes even this aspect of the novel postmodern as well. For example, he pokes a bit of fun at elaborate metaphorical descriptions favored by some authors with an occasional description like this one:
an hour at which (as it was now mid-winter) the dirty fingers of Night would have drawn her sable curtain over the universe, had not the moon forbid her, who now, with a face as broad and as red as those of some jolly mortals, who, like her, turn night into day, began to rise from her bed, where she had slumbered away the day, in order to sit up all night.
Or this, satirizing some authors’ elaborate ways of saying the simplest things:
Twelve times did the iron register of time beat on the sonorous bell-metal, summoning the ghosts to rise, and walk their nightly round.—In plainer language, it was twelve o’clock…
Or this, spoofing the tendency of some writers to cite ancient authorities when they assert some significant point:
It is, I think, the opinion of Aristotle; or if not, it is the opinion of some wise man, whose authority will be as weighty when it is as old,…
Fielding’s novel has been popular since its first appearance, going through four editions in its first year of publication. It was turned into an opera as early as 1765. Three more operas have been created since, as well as both straight and musical stage adaptations, two BBC miniseries, and two film versions, one a musical. Of all these, the 1963 film adaptation (which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture), directed by Tony Richardson and starring an irresistible young Albert Finney as Tom, is most in keeping with the tone and spirit of the novel, and despite its shrinking the novel’s 18 books and 900 pages into two hours, could serve as an excellent introduction if you can’t quite decide to commit to the novel yet. Or, more ideally, read the novel and then watch the movie, and mourn for what is lost.
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