The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Henry Fielding’s novels helped to shape the development of this new literary genre in the early decades of the 18th century. In the Middle Ages, when Latin was the language of learning and government, popular literature in the English language included long poems or prose narratives called romances, which often described the marvelous adventures of knights and ladies; a prime example would be Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, written in the late 15th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, these long tales of adventure continued to be popular elsewhere in Europe, and the style can most aptly be seen in early novels such as the picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Don Quixote (1605), by Miguel Cervantes. In England during that time frame, plays flourished as popular entertainment, and the most sophisticated literary forms were epic poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Romances continued to be popular, but prose narratives such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) began to incorporate social and political commentary. The growth of the printing press made print material more affordable, and as rates of literacy increased, prose narratives became more widely available.