Discovered as an infant in the bed of the kindly Somerset squire Allworthy, the foundling Tom Jones grows into a young man with the warmest heart and the worst judgment in the county — honest, brave, and loving, but reckless enough to give his enemies all the ammunition they need. He loves the beautiful, steadfast Sophia Western; but his low birth, his own follies, and the cold scheming of his rival Blifil contrive to have him cast out of Allworthy's house and onto the open road.

What follows is one of the great comic journeys in English literature: a picaresque progress through inns, ambushes, and chance encounters along the roads to London, where the tangle of mistaken judgments and hidden truths is at last undone and the secret of Tom's parentage revealed. Across eighteen books and hundreds of characters, Fielding builds a plot so exact that Coleridge ranked it among the three most perfect ever planned.

The novel is presided over by a genial, ironic, endlessly digressive narrator who addresses the reader as a travelling companion and opens each of the eighteen books with an essay on the art of fiction, on human nature, and on his own design. This intimate authorial voice — and Fielding's theory of the “comic epic poem in prose” — did as much as anything to invent the English novel, and shaped Sterne, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens after him.

Beneath the laughter runs a serious moral argument: that virtue is not the same as respectability, that a generous heart is worth more than a spotless name, and yet that good nature must learn prudence before it can find its happiness. This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1749 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note on Henry Fielding, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.