Tom Jones (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

The efforts of foundling Tom Jones to win the divine Sophia are thwarted not just by his calamitous susceptibility to so many female charms, but by all manner of misunderstandings, battles, misadventures and Dreadful Accidents. Through these picaresque romps, a twisting plot and a plethora of aptly named characters, including Squire Allworthy and tutor Thwackum, Fielding entertains us with the flaws, but essential goodness, of human nature. --Rachel Redford, The Oldie

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness. This `comic, epic poem in prose' will make the modern reader laugh as much as it did his forbears. Its biting satire finds an echo in today's society, for as Doris Lessing recently remarked `This country becomes every day more like the eighteenth century, full of thieves and adventurers, rogues and a robust, unhypocritical savagery side-by-side with people lecturing others on morality'.