The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding, in his 1749 picaresque novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,'' comically relates the reactions of a master and his servant to finding an infant in his bed. Upon discovering an abandoned child, master Mr. Allworthy and...

Tom Jones is a comedic novel by Henry Fielding that relays moral messages in an entertaining format, often demonstrating the downfalls of making assumptions, and of not questioning someone else’s motives in certain situations. Tom himself...

Amelia is certainly a change in direction from the writing style Henry Fielding employed in Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Gone are the frequent author-as-narrator interjections, as well as much of the comedic relief captured in the later mentioned...

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, states in the Chapter 1 of Book 1, “…nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone...

Although Fielding’s Tom Jones isn’t written in an entirely linear style, by far the lengthiest of his digressions, and seemingly the least relevant to the plot, is the episode in which Tom meets the Man of the Hill. A misanthropic hermit whose...

According to 18th-century feminist writer Mary Montagu, “Men, biased by custom, prejudice, and interest, have presumed boldly to pronounce sentence in their own favor, because possession empowered them to make violence take place of justice.” Over...