The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling Study Guide

Henry Fielding was born into a wealthy family in 1707 in Somerset, England. He was educated at Eton and went to live with his grandmother after his mother’s early death. After studying classics and law, he eventually went to work as a playwright in London. From the beginning, his works contained traces of the sarcasm and satire that would eventually go on to define his writing style, and he occasionally wrote under pseudonyms due to the controversial nature of his work. His first successful novel was called Shamela, a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. He followed it with an even more successful parody of Pamela called Joseph Andrews, focusing on the adventures of Pamela’s brother Joseph, a character Fielding invented. In 1749, Fielding published Tom Jones, perhaps his most notable work, and it went on to become a major bestseller. He also had a notable influence in the legal field for his work as a magistrate. Fielding died a few years later in 1754 while seeking treatment for his poor health in Lisbon, Portugal.

Tom Jones makes numerous references to the Jacobite rising of 1745. The rebellion involved an attempt by supporters of the House of Stuart to take the British throne away from the current king, George II. These rebels were called Jacobites, and they believed that their line of royalty had authority from God to rule. The Jacobites were a result of years of discontentment brewing after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, when James II, the last Catholic King of England, gave up the throne. Jacobites tended to be Catholic and have the strongest support in Ireland and Scotland. They did occasionally also receive some French support, although in general when characters in the novel reference a large French force invading the country they are reacting to what was actually a rumor and not the truth. After a loss at a battle at Culloden, the Jacobites eventually fell apart, with many surviving members either killed or exiled to colonies. This uprising remains a contentious issue that has been interpreted in a multitude of ways, particularly in the context of Scottish identity. One of the other most popular depictions of the Jacobite uprising is Waverly, by Walter Scott, which came out about half a century after Tom Jones.

Tom Jones is a more ambitious version of many of Fielding’s previous works, featuring a similar satirical tone and sarcastic narrator to Joseph Andrews. Fielding was deeply influenced by the earlier English novelist Samuel Richardson (Pamela). That said, Fielding’s multiple parodies of Richardson’s work suggest that he also disliked elements of Richardson’s writing style, in particular how Richardson’s work tended to be more didactic in its moral messages. The characters and narrator in Tom Jones frequently make references to classic literature, such as Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey). The Odyssey is one of the foundational stories for episodic travel narratives like Tom Jones. The novel also contains references to some of Fielding’s more immediate predecessors like William Shakespeare (Hamlet) and Alexander Pope (The Dunciad). Like Fielding, Shakespeare and Pope were technically inventive, using wordplay and irony but also exploring tragic and philosophical topics. Tom Jones is one of the formative examples of the British novel and of the novel in general—subsequent novels that take inspiration from it range from David Copperfield by Charles Dickins to postmodern literature like If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, which takes some of the metatextual ideas in early novels like Tom Jones and pushes them to the extreme. W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) are among the writers who have called Tom Jones one of their favorite novels.