The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

A lot of people enjoy recently written novels about people like themselves, people who live at roughly the same time, and do and say roughly the same sorts of things that they do. Borrowing from a quip Eliot Weinberger dropped in an interview—"I don't want to read about divorce in the suburbs, I can make a phone call and hear about that."—I can't help but think of these kinds of books as "divorce in the suburbs novels." Of course if that's the sort of thing those people enjoy, they should go right ahead in their search for the next Corrections. (I don't really remember what that novel was about—does anybody?—but it's a safe bet it contained at least one suburban divorce.)

For some of us, though, fiction provides a way to expand our worlds, to move beyond the people and places we know to different places, different cultures, different times. Published in 1749, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones takes us to Augustan England, and as some other old time novelist has remarked, "The past is another country."

Tom Jones is a picaresque novel, and true to the form, at the novel's core are the adventures our picaro experiences after being expelled from the village where his adoptive father, Squire Allworthy, had lovingly raised him. Worse, Tom is forcibly parted from Sophia, the woman with whom he is in love. He is sent into exile because Allworthy, who, as his name suggests, is entirely good, has allowed himself to fall under the influence of Tom's enemies. He has come to believe that Tom is a rogue, a rascal, and a scoundrel.

What makes Tom and the novel interesting is that this assessment of Tom is not entirely wrong. Tom is, in fact, a rogue, and also a rascal, but he is never a scoundrel. He is, in short, a good kind man, albeit one with a strong libido, a force that gives rise to not a few of the adventures through which Tom moves.

The novel is long, but rollicking: it moves right along. We never have to go more than a few pages without a laugh, but mixed in with the laughs are more serious incidents including the attempted rape of Sophia, an act that is sanctioned by an older lady who is meant to be caring for Sophia. The frankness about sex and desire, both in their healthy and unhealthy forms, seems a departure from the more buttoned up Victorians.

Tom Jones has been called "a motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery." It is, and we must be thankful for that.