Henry Fielding influenced the main tradition of the English novel through the eighteenth century (e.g., Smollett) and the nineteenth century (e.g., Dickens and Thackeray). With the tightly structured Tom Jones, in which every detail has a purpose, Fielding contributed a sense of structure to the development of the English novel; some critics have called it one of the best plotted novels in English, despite a lengthy interpolated story, "The Man on the Hill." With the character Tom Jones, he introduced a new kind of fictional hero–a good hearted, well intentioned, generous young man with ordinary human weakness, one who yields to temptation with women and to make errors in judgement. With his theories of the novel, expressed primarily in Joseph Andrews, Fielding attempted to give dignity and status to the new genre of the novel by relating it to the classical epic.

For Fielding, art is artifice or deliberately crafted (this view contrasts with modern theories of realism as a "slice of life"). Nevertheless, Fielding as well as Richardson and Sterne was regarded as startlingly realistic and widely admired by contemporary readers on the continent.

Fielding believed, as did most eighteenth century writers and educated readers, that the purpose of art is to create pleasure which is both civilized and civilizing.