Tom Jones: Henry Fielding

For Coleridge the plot of Tom Jones was, along with that of Oedipus the King, the most perfect ever constructed. Fielding used all his art and all the craft he had amassed as a successful playwright for the eighteenth-century London stage to tell this hugely entertaining story of a foundling and how he arrives, through sexual misadventures and elaborate disasters, to claim his legitimacy, his fortune and his true love.