Fiction as history refers to that time in which the story developed. Fiction or fictional has come to acquire such strong affinities with the novel that is used by author two synonymously, that simply means character in a novel symbolize specific attitudes in a given society and the writer conveys through them those significant impression which she or he has gathered from the surrounding. During the time of narrator, there was tendency for young women who come to disgrace and become pregnant prior to marriage and leave their babies to a landlord in rich family.
Characters and social impressions merge into each other and the end -product strongly binds us to the represented action. But the writer does not merely gather impression from life. What happens is that impressions precede character and are in fact moulded and re -made into character by the author. All these are truly fictional- moulding and remaking imply that the author’s imagination has been at work in an intense manner, this is not only but there is also a plausible life like situation that the writer is supposed to invent. This means that the characters in the story cannot be constructed and rendered flesh and blood unless they are placed in identifiable circumstances of our own world.
The character in a work of fiction become our links with the period in which the writer has lived and stand for those actual trends that existed at that time. For instance; Allworthy, Western, Jones and Blifil in Tom Jones present the development of 18th century English society, the society of a period become a necessary component of fiction and fiction becomes significant history. That is how the line between the imaginative and the real gets blurred and history intrudes inevitably into fiction.
Around the 18th century in England, history becomes a matter of vital internet for the common writers who set out to do justice to it by focusing upon the behavior and problems of ordinary men and women.
However, the novel is different from history in one important respect, the novel begins at a particular point of life in society as well as ends at another point. Those two points in the novel recognized and chosen by the author are extremely significant because between them the segment of social life lies. It is a significant difference between history, the life of actual people at a given time and a literary work.
Therefore, the writer’s intentions of writing this novel could be indefinitely deferred or the idea altogether discarded. On its writing starting from the idea of the of the fictional piece, the author gives it slant and direction.
Therefore, the novel Tom Jones is written and published by Henry Fielding, Tom Jones the protagonist a young boy who plays the significantly important role in describing English society of 18th century England.
The Literary World 