ABSTRACT

The statistical analysis of parish registers shows that from the early eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, England saw a continuous rise in the birth rate of children born out of wedlock. This chapter analyses Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, first published in 1749, in order to help understand how children born out of wedlock lived in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. For this investigation Fielding can be seen as a promising author because he had studied law and worked in the legal field before writing Tom Jones. First of all, in a society based on the hereditary principle, the authorial creation of a foundling represents an almost perfect driving force for any work of fiction. Mystery is the very fundament of the plot of Tom Jones.