The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Title page from the 1749 edition | |
| Author | Henry Fielding |
|---|---|
| Original title | The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Andrew Millar |
Publication date | 28 February 1749 |
| Publication place | England |
| Text | Tom Jones at Wikisource |
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on 28 February 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels, in which Maugham ranks the ten best novels of the world.
The novel is highly organised despite its length. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned", alongside Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. It became a best-seller, with four editions published in its first year alone. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel.