"Cliff Notes - Tom Jones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

poor. He presided over a busy police court and founded a
forerunner of Scotland Yard (the London police force). With a
friend, the artist William Hogarth, he fought the rampant
alcoholism which the recent introduction of gin had brought to
England. Meanwhile, his personal life was in turmoil. In 1744
his beloved wife, Charlotte, and a daughter both died, plunging
him into depression. He also developed painful gout. Yet
throughout these trials, he kept writing.

Tom Jones was published in 1749, and it was an immediate,
enormous success. The entire first edition of 2000 copies was
sold out before the date of publication. Some readers disliked
it as much as Samuel Johnson did later; they called it "truly
profligate" and "offensive to every chaste reader." But that
didn't discourage sales. Three more editions sold out in the
first year.

There are a number of reasons for Tom Jones' success, and for
the fact that it is still so widely read today. Fielding was a
master of storytelling. The nineteenth-century poet and critic
Samuel Coleridge called Tom Jones "one of the most perfect plots
ever planned." Fielding keeps numerous plots and subplots going
at once, and makes them collide in fascinating ways. His
experience in the theater helped him give the novel a dramatic
structure, full of sharp, lively scenes. Fielding's comic gifts
provide his readers with brilliant satire as well. And he makes
ample use of his broad classical education, elevating the novel
to what he called a "comic epic-poem in prose."

Although some readers have criticized Fielding's work for not
presenting an intimate portrayal of emotion and mood, Fielding
provides this sense of intimacy in his own way. The narrator in
Tom Jones is one of the friendliest, most personable companions
in literature. He's someone you'd love to have dinner with. He
amuses you with his wit, dazzles you with his intelligence,
warms you with his hospitality. After you've read his great
novel, you feel as though you've been on a carriage ride with
one of the best traveling companions you could find.

In short, in Tom Jones, Fielding wrote a book that is
important both as a great novel in its own right and as one of
the works that established the novel form. As the critic Martin
Battestin writes,

Tom Jones is at once the last and the consummate literary
achievement of Fielding's age.... The place Henry Fielding's
finest novel holds in "the great tradition" of English fiction
is quite secure. Not just as the mirror of... an age or as
the... influence behind such different writers as Jane Austen
and Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot... but as a work of art