The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Tom Jones

Title page from the 1749 edition
Author	Henry Fielding
Original title	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Country	England
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Andrew Millar
Publication date	28 February 1749

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.^[1] It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels among the ten best novels of the world.^[2]

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.^[3] It became a best seller with four editions published in its first year alone.^[4] It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel.^[5]