Tom JonesHenry Fielding

Fielding subtitled his 1749 novel a history and called the genre a comic epic poem in prose. Tom Jones runs to eighteen books, and each one opens with an essay chapter in which Fielding steps forward to discuss critics, the rules of his art, love, or whatever else the story has just raised. The plot is engineered with a precision Coleridge counted among the three most perfect in literature. A foundling is raised in Somerset by Squire Allworthy, disinherited on false evidence supplied by the pious Blifil, driven out on the road to London, entangled with Mrs. Waters and Lady Bellaston, brought to the edge of the gallows and of unwitting incest, then cleared, restored, and married to Sophia Western.

The argument under the comedy concerns what goodness is. Tom is generous, brave, and truthful, and he is also incontinent, careless, and ruinous to himself. Blifil keeps every rule and is a monster. Fielding's claim is that good nature without prudence is nearly useless and prudence without good nature is worse than useless, and he built the book so the reader tests that claim against a hundred incidents before the narrator ever states it.

Written against Richardson's identification of virtue with female chastity, Tom Jones moves the moral question from conduct to character. Adler cites it under Virtue and Vice, Love, Prudence, Family, Honor, and Custom, generally where the tradition is trying to separate what a man does from what he is.