John Butt shows that while the English novel did not, strictly speaking, begin with the work of Fielding and Richardson, Fielding especially made a very definite and brilliant contribution to its development. Butt examines the novels and reveals that Joseph Andrews, 'a display of the Ridiculous, of the affectations which arise from vanity and hypocrisy', Tom Jones, that splendid portrait, as Thackeray was enviously to note, of a whole man, and Amelia, with its unrivalled panorama of eighteenth-century London society, owe much to Fielding's broad and lesser-known experience in other spheres. In his earlier career as a dramatist, theatre manager, and also as a journalist, can be found the sources of the narrative skill and especially of the handling of dialogue for which Fielding's novels are remarkable.

John Butt was Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Literature at Edinburgh, and General Editor of the great Twickenham edition of Pope's poetry. He was engaged in writing the volume in The Oxford History of English Literature covering the period 1740-80 when he died in 1965.