How Vanity Fair drew on The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
A documented line of influence: William Makepeace Thackeray demonstrably engaged Henry Fielding’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Henry Fielding · 1749
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Vanity Fair’s page
- That intrusive, knowing narrator who keeps interrupting Vanity Fair to lecture you — Thackeray took the technique directly from Fielding's Tom Jones
- He said as much, praising Fielding in his 1853 lectures on the eighteenth-century humourists; scholarship names Tom Jones as this book's structural and stylistic model
- Read Tom Jones first and "A Novel Without a Hero" reads as the rebuttal it is — Thackeray rejecting the lovable scapegrace Fielding asked you to forgive
On The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling’s page
- Fielding's chatty, intrusive narrator — stepping out from behind the story to comment, judge, and steer — is the model Thackeray inherited a century later for Vanity Fair
- Thackeray venerated him publicly, devoting part of his 1853 lectures on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century to Fielding
- But Vanity Fair is also an argument with Tom Jones: Thackeray subtitled his book "A Novel Without a Hero" precisely because he thought Fielding's flawed foundling was no one to admire