Recommendations
Books Like Tom Jones
Best books to read after Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is one of the greatest comic novels in English — picaresque, digressive, and narrated with a wit that defines the English comic tradition. These recommendations extend the experience through Fielding's other work and through the tradition of the picaresque and comic novel in English and European fiction.
- 1Buy
Joseph Andrews
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's first novel — written as a parody of Richardson's Pamela, following Pamela's fictional brother Joseph on the road from London to the country. The predecessor to Tom Jones in Fielding's development of the comic novel, and the text where Fielding first articulated his theory of the 'comic epic poem in prose.'
- 2Buy
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The ancestor of Tom Jones in the European picaresque tradition — the man of excessive idealism on the road, meeting various characters who represent the range of human folly and virtue. Fielding explicitly acknowledged Cervantes as his model and Don Quixote as the foundation of the tradition he was working in.
- 3Buy
Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson
The contemporary rival to Tom Jones — Richardson's earnest, psychologically intense novel about female virtue is the direct contrast to Fielding's comic, digressive novel about a good-hearted but imprudent young man. Reading both novels together shows the full range of what the early English novel was doing.
- 4Buy
Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's 1759-67 comic novel about a man trying to write his autobiography is the radical successor to Fielding's digressive, self-aware narrative style — a novel that takes the digressiveness of Tom Jones and makes digression itself the subject.
- 5Buy
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's 1848 novel, subtitled 'A Novel Without a Hero,' is the Victorian successor to the Fielding comic tradition — an ironic, digressive narrative voice, a panoramic social portrait, and a skeptical view of conventional morality that owes an explicit debt to the eighteenth-century comic novel.
- 6Buy
Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain
Twain's American comic novel about a boy's adventures on the Mississippi draws directly on the Fielding picaresque tradition — the good-hearted, mischievous young man on a series of adventures that test his character. Tom Jones's most direct American descendant.
- 7Buy
The Adventures of Roderick Random
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's 1748 picaresque novel — published the same year as Clarissa — is the direct contemporary rival to Tom Jones in the English picaresque tradition, organized around a Scottish protagonist's adventures across Britain and Europe. More satirical and less genial than Fielding.
- 8Buy
Jonathan Wild
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's 1743 satirical novel about the highwayman Jonathan Wild is the darkest of his major novels — a sustained ironic portrait of a criminal who is treated as a great man. The contrast with Tom Jones's good-heartedness defines the range of Fielding's moral imagination.
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