The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

A foundling is raised by a country squire, thrown out on a false charge, and walks to London through inns, highwaymen and a rebellion, with the girl he wants engaged to someone else. Fielding was a magistrate who founded London's first police force, and the book is arranged like a case: eighteen books, each opening with an essay to the reader. It was called immoral for a century because the hero is not chaste. One hundred plates of eighteenth-century painting, from Hogarth to Stubbs, carry the road, the inns and the country houses of Fielding's England alongside the text.