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Book 1, Chapter 13
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Virtue vs. Vice
Marriage, Romance, and Economics
Appearance vs. Reality
Coming of Age
Storytelling, Literature, and Structure
Summary
Analysis
The narrator says that although the book has “history” in the title, it is more about the life of a person than it is about larger historical matters. The narrator plans to skip years where nothing interesting happens, and he hopes that the audience bears with him for this change and doesn’t find him too tyrannical as a storyteller.
The narrator again explores how to tell a story, laying out what it means to write “history” and how Tom Jones both does and doesn’t fit within that genre. The narrator’s note about skipping around in Tom’s life indicates how highly structured the novel is and shows how, while the novel makes certain gestures toward realism, it doesn’t include events simply for being realistic, skipping over things that might be boring or irrelevant.
Active
Themes
