American Toby Jug Museum 

Tom Jones bell produced by Royal Cornwall of Japan in 1983. "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling", often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel first published in February of 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. The novel is highly organized despite its length. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned". It became a best-seller, with four editions published in its first year alone. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel. Master Thomas "Tom" Jones is a bastard and Squire Allworthy's ward. The main theme of the novel is the contrast between Tom Jones' good nature, flawed but eventually corrected by his love for virtuous Sophia Western, and his half-brother Blifil's hypocrisy.