Captain Blifil's son, known as Master Blifil, is a miserable and jealous boy who conspires against Tom. By then, he has fathered a boy who grows up with the bastard Tom. Captain Blifil and his wife start to grow cool towards one another, and the former is found dead from apoplexy one evening after taking his customary evening stroll before dinner. He does, and, soon after, he dies 'of a broken heart'. After the marriage, Captain Blifil begins to show a coldness to his brother, who eventually feels obliged to leave the house for London. The doctor introduces the captain to Bridget in the hope of marrying into Allworthy's wealth. Two brothers, Dr Blifil and Captain Blifil, regularly visit the Allworthy estate. Mr Allworthy mercifully removes Jenny to a place where her reputation will be unknown and tells his sister to raise the boy, whom he names Thomas, in his household. Jenny is brought before the Allworthys and admits being the one who put the baby in the bed, but she refuses to reveal the father's identity. After searching the nearby village Mrs Wilkins is told about a young woman called Jenny Jones, a servant of a schoolmaster and his wife, as the most likely person to have committed the deed. He summons his housekeeper, Mrs Deborah Wilkins, to take care of the child. Allworthy returns from London after an extended business trip and finds an abandoned baby sleeping in his bed. The kindly and wealthy Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget are introduced in their wealthy estate in Somerset. It opens with the narrator stating that the purpose of the novel will be to explore 'human nature'. The novel's events occupy eighteen books. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel. It became a best seller with four editions published in its first year alone. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned', alongside Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist. The novel is highly organised despite its length.

Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels among the ten best novels of the world. It was first published on 28 February 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding