The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754), the son of a lieutenant-general, was born at Sharpham Park, the house of his maternal grandfather in Somerset. His mother died when he was eleven, and, when his father remarried, Henry was sent to Eton. At 19 he determined to earn his living as a dramatist, and in 1728, at Drury Lane, his play “Love in Several Masques” was successfully performed. In the same year he became a student of letters at Leyden, where he remained about 18 months, enlarging his knowledge of classical literature. Between 1729 and 1737 wrote some 25 dramas in the form of farce and satire.
Fielding is generally agreed to be an innovating master of the highest originality. Sir W. Scott commended him for his “high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded”. His three acknowledged masters were Lucian, Swift, and Cervantes.
His novel, “The History of Tom Jones” was published in 1749. Highly organized, was thought by Coleridge to have one of the three great plots of all literature. The book is regarded as Fielding´s greatest, and as one of the first and most influential of English novels.