by Fielding in his new home. Making fair allowance for the usual tardy progress of a book through the press, and taking into consideration the fact that the author was actively occupied with his yet unfamiliar magisterial duties, it is most probable that the last chapter of Tom Jones had been penned before the end of 1748, and that after that time it had been at the printer’s. For the exact price paid to the author by the publisher on this occasion we are indebted to Horace Walpole, who, writing to George Montagu in May 1749, says—“Millar the bookseller has done very generously by him [Fielding]: finding Tom Jones, for which he had given him six hundred pounds, sell so greatly, he has since given him another hundred.”
It is time, however, to turn from these particulars to the book itself. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding’s work had been mainly experimental. He had set out with an intention which had unexpectedly developed into something else. That something else, he had explained, was the comic epic in prose. He had discovered its scope and possibilities only when it was too late to re-cast his original design; and though Joseph Andrews has all the freshness and energy of a first attempt in a new direction, it has also the manifest disadvantages of a mixed conception and an uncertain plan. No one had perceived these defects more plainly than the author; and in Tom Jones he set himself diligently to perfect his new-found method. He believed that he foresaw a “new Province of Writing,” of which he regarded himself with justice as the founder and lawgiver; and in the “prolegomenous, or introductory Chapters” to each book—those delightful resting-spaces where, as George Eliot
