1. Tom Jones, however, might have been made for the screen. Never mind
its numerous chapters and teeming cast of misfits and scoundrels, the
central character is an attractively unbridled young man of fierce temper
and unrestrained sexuality who pursues true love through contemporary
Britain in a sequence of scandalous and hilarious adventures. Published
in the mid-18th century, Tom Jones is a classic English novel that
captures the spirit of its age and whose famous characters – Squire
Western, the chaplain Thwackum, the scheming Blifil, seductive Molly
Seagrim and Sophia, Tom's true love – have come to represent Augustan
society in all its loquacious, turbulent, comic variety.
The secret of Tom Jones was to be intimately connected to its
contemporary audience. By the 1740s, the English novel was attracting
new kinds of reader and, in turn, new kinds of writer. Not only was there
an explosion of print media and a booming middle-class audience, there
were innovative novelists for whom this popular new genre offered the
prospect of a decent living. Many would continue to starve in Grub
Street, but some had begun to make money. Samuel Johnson, famously,
sold his over-earnest romance, Rasselas, to pay for his mother's funeral.
Henry Fielding was typical of this new generation. Born in 1707, he was
a wholly 18th-century man. With a classical education at Eton, family
connections and a good career in the law, in which he is sometimes
credited with laying the foundations of the Metropolitan police, he
turned to fiction partly to fund an extravagant lifestyle and partly to
engage with a stimulating contemporary audience.
Fielding was writing at a time of intense social and political change and
took up his pen in response to the crises of the moment. Until the
repressive Licensing Act of 1737, he had enjoyed a reputation as the
author of satirical burlesques. When the Jacobite uprising (the '45)
threatened the Hanoverian settlement, Fielding sprang to the defence of
George II, and edited the True Patriot.
In hindsight, the English novel was an obvious new arena for his
imagination, but it was literary rivalry that pushed him, in middle age,

2. on to the path of fiction. In 1740, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or
Virtue Rewarded, the tale of a young woman who becomes a great lady
and finds true happiness by defending her chastity, was the London
sensation of the season, an early bestseller. Fielding's response to
Pamela was complicated. He admired its success, scorned its sententious
moralising, and attacked it in an anonymous parody, Shamela (1741).
Thriving on the competition with Richardson, Fielding next completed
his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), which began as a further parody
of Pamela before finding its own narrative voice. After this debut,
following the dramas of the '45, Fielding began work on his masterpiece,
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
For Coleridge, this long novel was, with Oedipus Rex and The
Alchemist, one of "the three most perfect plots ever planned". It was also
highly original and deeply comic. Fielding broke away from
Richardson's epistolary technique of "writing to the moment" to
compose his narrative in the third person. This engaging picaresque tale
about the adventures of Tom, a high-spirited bastard, rollicking through
England, was an instant hit, selling some 10,000 copies at a time when
the population of London was only around 700,000.
One conservative critic denounced Tom Jones as "a motley history of
bastardism, fornication, and adultery", which can't have done sales any
harm. Samuel Johnson, more measured, thought that such novels were a
dangerous distraction "to the young, the ignorant and the idle…",
offering merely "the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas".
However, for better or worse, this mass audience represented the future
of the genre, and inspired Fielding's opening credo, which was to
provide "an entertainment" for public consumption. "The author", he
wrote in his first chapter, should provide "a mental entertainment",
where "all persons are welcome for their money". Quite so.