Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Tom Jones is a foundling, a baby left mysteriously in a rich squire's house and raised as his own. Tom grows up kind, brave, and far too fond of fun, while his foster brother Blifil schemes against him in secret. Banished from home, Tom travels across England, getting into fights, rescues, and scrapes, all while loving the beautiful Sophia. Fielding tells it like a friend who keeps laughing at his own story.
Henry Fielding had been a successful playwright until stage censorship ended his theatre career, and he turned to novels and the law. The History of Tom Jones, published in 1749, was his masterpiece, planned like an epic and built with care: eighteen books, each opening with an essay in which Fielding talks directly, and often very funnily, to his reader.
The foundling Tom is raised by the generous Squire Allworthy in Somerset, beside Allworthy's nephew Blifil, who is everything Tom is not: prim, cold, and careful. Tom's love for Sophia Western, the squire's daughter next door, and his own generous recklessness, bring on his banishment. The road to London that follows is the heart of the book: inns, highwaymen, soldiers, a Man of the Hill, Upton's famous inn, and London itself.
Fielding hides Tom's parentage until the end, and the unravelling rewards the long journey. Beneath the comedy sits a serious kindness: Fielding judges his people by their hearts, not their reputations. Readers who enjoy Dickens, road stories, or a narrator who feels like company will understand why this novel has been loved for over two centuries.
Henry Fielding, a London playwright turned magistrate, published The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in 1749, and called it a comic epic in prose. A baby of unknown parentage is left in Squire Allworthy's bed and raised beside the prim heir Blifil. Grown wild and warm hearted, Tom is exiled, and his journey to London crosses inns, battles, prisons, and his beloved Sophia Western. It offers the great comic novel of its century.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was published in 1749 in eighteen books, and Fielding's dedication and opening chapters present it frankly as a feast, with a bill of fare in the first chapter of Book I. Each book opens with an introductory essay, a form Fielding uses to discuss his art, his critics, and his readers.
The contents alone map the design: Book I contains as much of the birth of the foundling as is necessary, the Somerset books raise Tom beside Blifil and introduce Sophia Western, the middle books follow the road through Bristol and the inn at Upton toward London, and the final books gather the action in the capital, where secrets about Tom's birth are at last disclosed and old accounts settled.
Read the introductory chapters rather than skipping them: they are half the pleasure and all of the method. Fielding promises truth to nature rather than wonders, and his crowded, carefully timed plot is the proof he offers for the promise.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 6593.
The first chapter
In that part of the western division of this kingdom which is commonly called Somersetshire, there lately lived, and perhaps lives still, a gentleman whose name was Allworthy, and who might well be called the favourite of both nature and fortune; for both of these seem to have contended which should bless and enrich him most. In this contention, nature may seem to some to have come off victorious, as she bestowed on him many gifts, while fortune had only one gift in her power; but in pouring forth this, she was so very profuse, that others perhaps may think this single endowment to have been more than equivalent to all the various blessings which he enjoyed from nature. From the former of these, he derived an agreeable person, a sound constitution, a solid understanding, and a benevolent heart; by the latter, he was decreed to the inheritance of one of the largest estates in the county.
This gentleman had in his youth married a very worthy and beautiful woman, of whom he had been extremely fond: by her he had three children, all of whom died in their infancy. He had likewise had the misfortune of burying this beloved wife herself, about five years before the time in which this history chuses to set out. This loss, however great, he bore like a man of sense and constancy, though it must be confest he would often talk a little whimsically on this head; for he sometimes said he looked on himself as still married, and considered his wife as only gone a little before him, a journey which he should most certainly, sooner or later, take after her; and that he had not the least doubt of meeting her again in a place where he should never part with her more--sentiments for which his sense was arraigned by one part of his neighbours, his religion by a second, and his sincerity by a third.
He now lived, for the most part, retired in the country, with one sister, for whom he had a very tender affection. This lady was now somewhat past the age of thirty, an aera at which, in the opinion of the malicious, the title of old maid may with no impropriety be assumed. She was of that species of women whom you commend rather for good qualities than beauty, and who are generally called, by their own sex, very good sort of women--as good a sort of woman, madam, as you would wish to know. Indeed, she was so far from regretting want of beauty, that she never mentioned that perfection, if it can be called one, without contempt; and would often thank God she was not as handsome as Miss Such-a-one, whom perhaps beauty had led into errors which she might have otherwise avoided. Miss Bridget Allworthy (for that was the name of this lady) very rightly conceived the charms of person in a woman to be no better than snares for herself, as well as for others; and yet so discreet was she in her conduct, that her prudence was as much on the guard as if she had all the snares to apprehend which were ever laid for her whole sex. Indeed, I have observed, though it may seem unaccountable to the reader, that this guard of prudence, like the trained bands, is always readiest to go on duty where there is the least danger. It often basely and cowardly deserts those paragons for whom the men are all wishing, sighing, dying, and spreading every net in their power; and constantly attends at the heels of that higher order of women for whom the other sex have a more distant and awful respect, and whom (from despair, I suppose, of success) they never venture to attack.
Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther 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.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1749. Author died 1754. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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