The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. The novel is both a Bildungsroman and Picaresque novel. First published on 28 February 1749, Tom Jones is among the earliest English prose works describable as a novel, [1] and 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] Totaling 346, 747 words, it is divided into 18 smaller books, each preceded by a discursive chapter, often on topics totally unrelated to the book itself. It is dedicated to George Lyttleton.
