Henry Fielding’s most renowned work is unquestionably Tom Jones, a Foundling, which was published in 1749. It is a very long and complex novel but one which is carefully organised and logical. Indeed, Coleridge saw its plot as one of the three greatest in the history of literature. The story tells of a gentleman named Allworthy who has a large fortune and is a healthy and decent man. One night he steps into bed and finds to his surprise a infant wrapped in linen between his sheets and with the help of his beloved sister Bridget sorts out the boy’s future. A maidservant, Jenny Jones, admits that it is her child and the boy is given the name Tom Jones. Bridget marries Captain Brifil and they agree at Allworthy’s request to bring up the child. After troubled years, Tom grows to a young man but seems doomed to be hanged since he has already been convicted of robbing an orchard, stealing a duck and picking Master Blifil’s pocket by the age of fourteen. His weaknesses are his spirit of animal instinct and his lusty nature, though he is also cursed with ill luck. Tom falls in love with the daughter of Western, an ignorant and unpleasant individual. The boy’s life is made more difficult still by his enemies Thwackum and Square, and he ends up a wanderer. The novel centres upon these wandering times, and follows him as he ends up seduced by his own mother although it turns out that his true mother was another woman entirely. Such are the tribulations faced by our eponymous hero in this second of Fielding’s ‘comic epics’ after Joseph Andrews. Fielding is largely interested in human behaviour and motives, though not in their psychologies and he tends to be explanatory rather than exploratory. He owes something of a debt to Cervantes, whose Don Quixote is a precursor to this novel.