Tom at this point recognizes that his childhood affection for his beautiful, sweet-natured neighbor Sophia (whose portrait Fielding based upon his own wife Charlotte) has grown into adult love.
This leads Tom to be banished. Tom Jones really goes up and down the British class hierarchy: you've got the Seagrim family, living practically naked from poverty on Squire Allworthy's estate.
Rather than starve in the country, many of these newly poor took work in factory towns or moved to London, swelling its urban underclass. Meanwhile Sophia, disgusted by Blifil’s courtship, escapes her father’s close confinement and runs away to London with her maid, Mrs. Honour, intending to seek shelter there with her kinswoman Lady Bellaston.Amid many colorful adventures on the road, including falling in with a troop of redcoats marching north to oppose the Stuart rebellion, Tom encounters Partridge, the former schoolmaster thought to be his father, now traveling the country as a barber-surgeon. Tom’s generosity is rewarded when the alms he gives a beggar lead to his discovery of Sophia’s pocketbook, a sign that she has journeyed to London, which renews Tom’s hope of winning her.
In particular the role of marriage raised debatable questions: Should marriage be based on love or on purely economic considerations? Soon after, both Jenny and Partridge vanish from the town, Bridget marries the devious and brutal Captain Blifil, and they have a son, Master Blifil, who is raised alongside Tom. The influence of natural religion resulted in a growing emphasis on works rather than faith. An Uncle Tom is a black person who is submissive, docile, self-effacing, a race… The English author and magistrate Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was one of the great novelists of the 18th century. Since the mid-seventeenth century, there had been a trend toward greater autonomy for children in choosing marriage partners, except for the wealthiest classes, among whom considerations of property continued to determine alliances.
His first love is Molly, Black George's second daughter and a local beauty.
The novel is both a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. After finding out about the intrigues of Blifil, who is Tom's half-brother, Allworthy decides to bestow most of his inheritance on Tom. This class friction gives Fielding an opportunity for biting Squire Allworthy falls ill and is convinced that he is dying. In his role as local magistrate, Squire Allworthy predicts that this fate will befall Jenny Jones, Tom’s presumed mother, when he tells her that by her “crime” she will be “rendered infamous, and driven, like Lepers of old, out of Society; at least from the Society of all but wicked and reprobate Persons; for no others will associate with you” (Fielding, The voice of community censure is embodied in the person of Mrs. Deborah Wilkins, Squire Allworthy’s “elderly Woman Servant,” whose “pure Eyes” size up the infant Tom’s situation immediately: “I hope your Worship will send out your Warrant to take up the Hussy its Mother (for she must be one of the neighborhood) and I should be glad to see her committed to Faugh, how it stinks! According to the dictates of his generous heart, Tom forgives all who have wronged him, including the detestable Blifil.As indicated, economic changes in the eighteenth century were upsetting traditional social patterns.
Sophia wants to conceal her love for Tom, so she gives a majority of her attention to Blifil when the three of them are together. This highest reality is found in the essential forms of things and in generalized representative types; the artist must penetrate through particulars to the general, through what is accidental to what is universal.
Mainstream dissent from the Anglican Church, once the driving force behind the Puritan revolution, visibly declined in English popular life and retreated, at least for the moment, to its traditional support among the urban middle class. But The main theme of the novel is the contrast between Tom Jones's good nature, flawed but eventually corrected by his love for Both introductory chapters to each book and interspersed commentary introduce a long line of further themes.
Squire Western wants Sophia to marry Blifil in order to gain property from the Allworthy estate. To a certain degree, Fielding remained loyal to the classical tradition of Plato and Aristotle, who taught that the highest reality transcends the realm of shadowy particulars in which daily life is lived.
This, however, is not the case, as Tom's mother is in fact Bridget Allworthy, who conceived him after an affair with a schoolmaster. Tom Jones, like its predecessor, Joseph Andrews, is constructed around a romance plot. Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar conspire to have Tom press-ganged into the navy, but instead he is arrested and imprisoned after a fight in which it first appears he has killed his assailant.Sophia cannot forgive Tom’s entanglement with Lady Bellaston, and his fortunes are at their nadir. This rapid population growth exacerbated poverty, which adversely affected illegitimate children:One consequence of the rise in the proportion of the propertyless in the society was a rise in the rates of illegitimate to legitimate births.… The rise in bastardy inevitably stimulated some deliberate infanticide and a great deal of abandonment, for the plight of an unmarried mother without means of support was bad enough to encourage a few desperate women to murder their newly born infants and many more to leave them in the streets either to die or to be looked after by a charitable passer-by, the parish workhouse, or a foundling hospital.Illegitimacy was rapidly rising in eighteenth-century England, even though the social ramifications for the parents were disastrous.
Squire Allworthy suspects that the infant whom he adopts and names Tom Jones is the illegitimate child of his servant Jenny Jones.