The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling is a comic novel by the English writer Henry Fielding, first published on 28 February 1749. It follows Tom Jones, an infant of unknown parentage taken in and raised by the wealthy, good-hearted Squire Allworthy in Somerset, who grows into a generous but impulsive young man in love with Sophia Western, the daughter of a neighboring squire. Tom's illegitimate birth blocks their union, and the scheming of his jealous half-brother Blifil, who falsely accuses Tom of celebrating Allworthy's supposed death, gets him banished from the estate. Tom then travels across England toward London, gathering companions including the comic barber Partridge and stumbling through a chain of romantic misadventures, before his true parentage is finally revealed: he is in fact Allworthy's own nephew, the secret son of Allworthy's sister Bridget, which clears the way for his marriage to Sophia. The poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge later named its plot one of the three most perfect ever planned, alongside Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and the novel, an immediate bestseller that ran through four editions in its first year, is widely regarded as among the earliest and greatest works in the English novel tradition.