Poor Bastard: Henry Fielding’s Triumphant ‘Tom Jones’

Samuel Johnson Called It ‘Corrupt.’ Coleridge Called It ‘Wholesome.’ Who’s Right?

When Tom Jones first appeared in 1749, it had immediate fans and immediate foes. The first printing sold out before the ink was dry, and Henry Fielding’s masterpiece has never dropped out of print, nor have people stopped talking about it.

The massive novel, printed in six volumes, sold 10,000 copies in its first year, exhausting four printings—not counting pirated editions produced in Ireland. And its fame soon spread abroad as Dutch, French, and German readers clamored for translations.

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones.

A generation later, when the British abolitionist Hannah More quoted “some witty passages” from the novel, the famed lexicographer Samuel Johnson recoiled. “I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it . . . I scarcely know a more corrupt work!” Johnson had plenty of company. Many deemed Fielding inferior to Samuel Richardson, whose novels Clarissa and Pamela captivated contemporary readers.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell loved the book. He found Johnson’s “unaccountable depreciation” of Fielding baffling, saying, “‘Tom Jones’ has stood the test of publick opinion with such success, as to have established its great merit, both for the story, the sentiments, and the manners, and also the varieties of diction. . . .”

Give Samuel Taylor Coleridge a choice between Fielding and Richardson, and the poet picks Tom Jones without reservation. Coleridge not only praised the story for possessing one of “the three most perfect plots ever planned”—along with Oedipus Rex and Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist—but he delighted in the effect of the writing. “How charming, how wholesome Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day in May.”

The Bastard Tom

If you venture a read, you’ll find erected upon that vast expanse of lawn a sprawling, zany, Rube Goldberg device of a plot, engineered with such narrative precision and comedic genius it’s nearly impossible to imagine how Fielding pulled it off. Calculating the number of contingencies and relationships between people and events would give a statistician heart palpitations.¹

Fielding constructs the story around a dozen or so primary characters, all played to maximum satirical effect, and several dozen lesser characters who populate the various houses, inns, and roadways from Somerset to London.

It all starts when Squire Thomas Allworthy retires to bed after a long trip from his country estate and finds a baby under the sheets. Inquiries point to one Jenny Jones as the unwed mother, who Allworthy helps relocate to another area away from the scorn of her neighbors. Allworthy keeps the child, gives him his own name, and raises the boy as his own—hence, Tom Jones. But, as a bastard, Jones won’t inherit the estate, which leaves an opening.

Jones found in Allworthy’s bed. Image by Thomas Rowlandson.

Allworthy’s sister Bridget lives with him and is soon courted and married by the calculating opportunist Captain Blifil who imagines he’ll inherit the estate, the value of which he’s constantly totting up as he meanders around the grounds, consulting actuarial tables to determine when Allworthy might conk and leave it all to him. Alas, he conks first, leaving Bridget with a son, young Master Blifil, who is raised alongside Tom like a younger brother and who will inherit the estate.

The two boys couldn’t be more unalike. While Tom is gregarious, impetuous, impulsive, he’s also gentle-hearted and kind. Blifil is, on the other hand, so priggish, hypocritical, and sycophantic readers risk occasional gagging. A pair of overbearing tutors, the brutal Rev. Thwackum and the sterile philosopher Square, oversee the boys’ education and formation. Blifil shines like an angel in their clouded eyes, whereas Tom’s immaturity ensures their contempt, the deck already stacked against him because of his parentage.

Fielding’s narrator telegraphs all this and more as he artfully guides the reader through the maze, sharing information as needed, withholding whatever he hopes to spring upon us later, and often divulging what he’s doing in the process. Fielding treats his readers like active participants in the performance of his characters, which amplifies the humor and pathos—and he’s winkingly ruthless.

Bumpy Ride

Fielding was an unlikely novelist. “He was by birth, education and literary sympathies much more closely allied with the earlier eighteenth-century grouping”—people like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope—”that despised novels than with the classes for which they were the chief reading-matter,” says Doreen Roberts of Rutherford College. Fielding was forced into it.

Despite a supposed family connection to the Habsburgs of Austria, Fielding grew up strapped for cash and constantly in debt. He turned to writing to pad his income, becoming a successful playwright. In the nine years between 1728 and 1737, he churned out more than twenty comedies, farces, ballad operas, and burlesques for the stage and, says University of Warwick professor Claude Rawson, “established himself as England’s leading playwright.” But nothing lasts forever.

Fielding’s later plays criticized Prime Minister Walpole’s government, and Fielding found himself censored out of a job by the Stage Licensing Act of 1737. “The Act effectively ended Fielding’s dramatic career,” says Rawson. So Fielding rustled up other work.

He studied law and became a barrister, practicing through the 1740s, followed by taking the job of magistrate for Westminster in 1748, where he organized London’s first professional police force, the Bow Street Runners. While sorting out London’s ruffians and ne’er-do-wells, Fielding also applied his talents to political journalism, editing and writing for a string of periodicals and stirring up trouble as he went.

Henry Fielding. Image by James Basire.

He also started writing novels, first a parody of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, published anonymously in 1741 as Shamela, commencing an on-and-off feud with Richardson that lasted until Fielding’s death in 1754. All the while, Fielding perfected his craft, taking the tools of the stage to his work, most effectively in Tom Jones.

“Fielding’s novels use a wide repertoire of stage routines: well-timed coincidences, contrived meetings, comic misunderstandings, conversations overheard at cross purposes,” says Rawson. “They also show a keen sense of the well-shaped, tightly ordered plot, especially remarkable in a work of such length and panoramic coverage as Tom Jones, and many local signs of theatrical organization: chapters and episodes framed as set-pieces, analogous in shape and length to a scene in a play; comic reversals and resolutions; a sharp ear for dialogue . . . designed to bring out the cant of social groups or the character-revealing accents of wicked or foolish types.”

It all makes for a bumpy ride for our hero, Tom.

Bad Luck on the Road

Few characters in English literature have worse luck than Tom. It’s not just his wormy little brother Blifil, the ogre Thwackum, and the smarmy Square. His lousy judgment—not to mention his raging libido—lead him into mess after mess, starting with Molly Seagrim. A romp with her lands him in fisticuffs with Blifil and his tutors.

With every indiscretion Allworthy’s good opinion of Tom erodes, but Fielding drags Tom’s trials across page, chapter, and book by constantly giving our hero just enough grace to maneuver into his next predicament, most of which leave residual effects that play into the later plot—none more importantly than Tom’s attempted courtship of his neighbor Sophia Western, daughter of Squire Western.

Tom is smitten by Sophia, and she returns his affection. But Tom’s lack of fortune and unfortunate background make their union impossible. Her father’s lands adjoin Allworthy’s, and Dad conceives of an advantageous match between his daughter and young Blifil—whom he mistakenly believes Sophia loves. But Sophia loathes Blifil and refuses the match.

She implores her father to not press the marriage on her, but the irascible and bombastic squire insists. She runs away from home, seeking shelter with a relative in London, a move she assumes will help her father come to his senses. Meanwhile, Tom has finally pushed Allworthy’s patience as far as it can go and finds himself turned out. Allworthy gives him enough money to sort himself out and sends him away.

Tom determines to go to war—the Jacobite rebellion being underway—but never quite makes it. Instead, hearing about Sophia, he pursues her. Along the way, he picks up a Sancho Panza companion in the form of Partridge, a man who was assumed to be Tom’s true father, despite his protestations to the contrary. Knowing nothing about Tom’s rejection by Allworthy, he thinks he can get back into Allworthy’s good graces himself if he leads Tom home. Instead, he follows Tom in his fruitless search for Sophia.

Much shenanigans with Jones at the center. Image by Thomas Rowlandson.

At every step, Fielding ups the ante and complicates the pursuit. While Tom edges closer to Sophia, he finds himself thwarted by impossible chasms, some he digs himself, others created by those taking advantage of him—including the conniving Lady Bellaston, Sophia’s cousin to whom she’s run for protection, who ensnares Tom in her own schemes.

All this plays out while Fielding tightens the noose around Tom’s neck, almost literally. Tom finds himself in jail facing murder charges; Sophia, learning of Tom’s inconstancy, rejects him; and a darker revelation comes to light that would seem to doom our hero. But there’s a long-hidden secret that can unwind the entire tangle, known to just a few—one, Blifil, desperately hoping to keep it quiet and another, Jenny Jones, who can finally reveal whose bastard Tom really is and what that might mean for his future.

Sackcloth to Silk

Readers can take this whole circus any number of ways—and did. Richardson not only hated it, he wrote his novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) as a rebuttal. This, said Richardson, is how a real gentleman behaves. As we’ve seen, readers were divided. Tom Jones is at once bawdy and rambunctious in ways that have long scandalized those sensitive to the language and characterizations Fielding so gleefully spreads across the page. Squire Western has, as my old boss David Dunham used to say, no holes in his tongue.

But no simple denunciation holds up to what the book really presents. Fielding’s moral vision operates between the following polarities, says Doreen Roberts: “appearance and reality, action and motive, reasoned principle and instinct, prudence and impulsiveness, self-interest and disinterestedness, suspicion and trust, and justice and mercy.” There’s nothing binary about the way these play out in life, nor in the novel. The tensions between them, stretched between Fielding’s elaborately constructed set pieces, drive the plot.

Circumstances force Tom to choose, sometimes well, sometimes (well, often) badly. And yet, however predetermined his actions might be by his superintending author—always talking to us readers about what fresh trouble is brewing—Jones possesses what feels like real agency. He blunders freely, and the blunders cost him. However preposterous the action gets, we can correlate it all to real life, which is why Henry Morley could say, “A page of [Fielding’s] is to a page of Richardson’s as silk to sackcloth.”

That’s where Samuel Johnson’s rejoinder to Hannah More strikes me as tone deaf to the novel. Tom Jones looks vicious only if you either demand moral perfection or mistake propriety for virtue—only if Blifil, who appears flawless, is therefore good, and Tom, who constantly errs, slips, and fumbles, is therefore bad. Nothing in life would suggest that’s how morality actually works.

Maybe Johnson can be excused. It takes Allworthy the entire novel to figure out what he missed. When he does, Allworthy repents and finally brings the poor bastard home.

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I’m reading twelve big-ass classic novels this year. Here’s the full schedule for 2026. Fielding’s Tom Jones was my May novel. Apologies for the delay in posting the review. Time to catch up with Tristram Shandy.

• January: John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• February: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

• March: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

• April: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

• May: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

• June: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

• July: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

• August: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

• September: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

• October: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

• November: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

• December: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Bonus big-ass classics:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

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1. If someone wants to try this, I’d love to see it.