Tom Jones Analysis

Tom Jones literally covers a lot of ground. Henry Fielding wants to show us as many aspects as he can of life in England in 1745, from the strong class hierarchies of the countryside to the glitter...

Tom Jones's narrator is definitely first person, since he says, "I" all the time. In fact, he makes references to his real life off the page, as Henry Fielding, so we know that the narrator is supp...

Comedy Fielding doesn't just leave us to guess what kind of a novel this is: he comes out and tells us. He announces that he is a "comic writer" (17.1.1), so Tom Jones is a comedy. And because it's...

The narrator admits that he plays favorites with his characters. For example, he confesses an "inclination of partiality" (16.6.2) to Sophia. In other words, he likes her better than a lot of his o...

Listen, we love Henry Fielding to death, but man, the guy can talk. His sentences are often incredibly long and involved, and he loves using SAT words on the tough end of the spectrum whenever he c...

The short title of this novel is Tom Jones, which is also the name of our hero. This title-equals-main-character's-name equation was a big thing back when Fielding was writing. You can barely throw...

If you mosey on over to our "Allusions" list, you'll see that Henry Fielding refers to the ancient Roman poet and critic Horace at least twenty-four times in Tom Jones. That's six more references t...

In the very last chapter of Tom Jones (Book 18, Chapter 13), Mr. Nightingale makes up with his dad. Tom and Sophia get married and return to the countryside. Mr. Blifil gets sent off to the north o...

We can't deny that Tom Jones is a tough read. Not only is there the usual difficulty of figuring out the old-fashioned language of a book published two hundred and fifty years ago, but Henry Fieldi...

Kindly Squire Adopts Unknown BabyThe big mystery at the start of Tom Jones surrounds our hero's origin story: is Tom really the son of Jenny Jones, the servant, and Mr. Partridge, the former school...

Obviously, there are lots of different kinds of comedies. Transparent and Groundhog Day are funny, but they have almost nothing else in common. So it's hard to break down what the major a...

Tom Jones is a great kid, but he is also—at least everyone thinks—the illegitimate son of absent parents (Jenny Jones and Mr. Partridge, the schoolteacher). He doesn't exactly have a fortune co...

Tom Jones includes a lot of criticism of unfair and biased judges in the British legal system. Well, it turns out that Henry Fielding really knew what he was talking about: starting in 1748, he ser...

There is definitely a lot of sex going on in this book, but Fielding is never explicit about any of it. He makes rude puns and mentions breasts a fair amount, but Tom Jones is still surprisingly no...

Tom Jones has many (ever so many) literary, cultural, and historical references. Fielding includes them on almost every page. Here, we have chosen to focus on his most prominent literary references...