Five-minute digest
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Summary
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature. In Somerset the benevolent Squire Allworthy finds an infant in his bed and adopts him. Jenny Jones, a servant, confesses to being the mother, and the schoolmaster Partridge is judged the father and ruined. Allworthy's sister Bridget marries the fortune-hunting Captain Blifil, who soon dies, and her son, Master Blifil, is brought up with Tom. Their tutors are the clergyman Thwackum, who preaches grace and practises the rod, and the philosopher Square, who talks of the natural beauty of virtue. Tom is generous, reckless and warm-hearted; Blifil is careful, correct and secretly malicious. Tom protects the poor gamekeeper Black George, falls into an affair with George's daughter Molly Seagrim, and wins the love of Sophia Western, daughter of the hard-drinking, fox-hunting Squire Western, by breaking his arm to save her from a fall. When Allworthy falls ill and recovers, Tom celebrates too freely, fights Blifil and Thwackum, and through Blifil's misrepresentations is banished. Western, wanting to unite the estates, orders Sophia to marry Blifil; she runs away to London with her maid Honour. On the road Tom joins soldiers marching against the Jacobite rising of 1745, is struck down by Ensign Northerton, and meets Partridge, now a barber, who becomes his talkative companion. He hears the long history of the Man of the Hill, rescues a Mrs Waters from Northerton, and spends the night with her at the inn at Upton, where Sophia also arrives, learns of it, and leaves her muff as a reproach. In London Tom becomes entangled with the rich Lady Bellaston, takes up the cause of his landlady Mrs Miller and her family, wounds Mr Fitzpatrick in a duel and is imprisoned. Partridge is horrified to learn that Mrs Waters is Jenny Jones, but she reveals that Tom's mother was Bridget Allworthy, and the lawyer Dowling discloses that Blifil suppressed his mother's dying letter. Allworthy recognizes Tom as his nephew and heir, Blifil is disgraced, and Sophia, satisfied that Tom has learned prudence, marries him. Published in six volumes by Andrew Millar in February 1749, the novel was an immediate success; Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson disapproved of its morals, while Coleridge later ranked its plot among the most perfect ever planned. The library text is the complete Project Gutenberg edition.
Top Lessons
A good heart needs prudence
Fielding's narrator says plainly in Book III that goodness of heart will not by itself carry a young man safely through the world. Tom's generosity is real, but his drinking, his affairs and his carelessness of appearances give Blifil the means to ruin him. The novel ends only when Tom has added discretion to his warmth.
Seeming and being
Blifil says the right things and keeps the outward rules; Tom breaks them and keeps faith with the poor. Thwackum and Square each have a theory of virtue and neither shows much charity. Fielding asks readers to judge people by their deeds and their kindness, not their professions.
The narrator as host
The essays that open each book make the reader a guest at the narrator's table, from the bill of fare in Book I to the farewell in Book XVIII. Fielding uses them to explain his new kind of writing, to tease critics and to teach the reader how to read. The novel becomes a conversation as well as a story.
Comic providence
The plot is full of chance meetings at inns, lost letters and mistaken identities, yet every thread is tied at the end, from Bridget's letter to Black George's banknote. Coleridge admired the design of the plot. The comic ending rewards patience and honesty and exposes concealment.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.”
“Square held human nature to be the perfection of all virtue, and that vice was a deviation from our nature, in the same manner as deformity of body is.”
“Thwackum, on the contrary, maintained that the human mind, since the fall, was nothing but a sink of iniquity, till purified and redeemed by grace.”
Frequently cited
“Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe.”
“Hushed be every ruder breath.”
“Dr Y. holding that he died of an apoplexy, and Dr Z. of an epilepsy.”
“why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.”
“He hath also, by reflection on his past follies, acquired a discretion and prudence very uncommon in one of his lively parts.”
Medical Lens
Fielding, who had satirized physicians on the stage, gives Tom Jones a gallery of mid-eighteenth-century practitioners. Two doctors dispute whether the dead Captain Blifil died of apoplexy or epilepsy; a surgeon bleeds Sophia after her fall from her horse; and after Northerton breaks a bottle on Tom's head an inn surgeon parades Latin terms (contusion, cutis, vulnus, phlebotomy) and boasts of drawing twenty ounces of blood, then insists on bleeding the feverish patient. Phlebotomy appears as the routine remedy for fevers, falls and wounds, in keeping with practice of the time. Allworthy's illness in Book V shows the period's deathbed customs and the physician's role in judging danger. Squire Western's drinking and the many tavern scenes record the hard drinking of the gentry, which the narrator treats comically rather than clinically.
- Book II, Chapters viii-ix
Captain Blifil dies suddenly; two physicians called in after death dispute apoplexy versus epilepsy.
- Book IV, Chapter xiv
A surgeon arrives after Tom saves Sophia, advises that she be blooded after her fall, and sets Tom's broken arm.
- Book V, Chapter vii
Allworthy, seriously ill, gathers his household to settle his affairs, believing himself near death.
- Book VII, Chapter xiii, and Book VIII, Chapter iii
The inn surgeon treats Tom's head wound with jargon and phlebotomy and quarrels when the patient refuses to be blooded again.