Having been thrown out of Paradise Hall, Tom Jones falls in with a company of soldiers. The Serjeant informs him ‘that they were marching against the Rebels, and expected to be commanded by the glorious Duke of Cumberland’. It is at this relatively late point in The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (Book VII, Chapter xii) that Fielding decides to inform ‘the Reader’ of ‘a Circumstance which we have not thought necessary to communicate before’, namely ‘that this was the very Time when the late Rebellion was at the highest; and indeed the Banditti were now marched into England, intending, as it was thought, to fight the King's Forces, and to attempt pushing forward to the Metropolis’. That Fielding chose to set the main action of his narrative right in the midst of the Forty-Five has not passed unnoticed by critics. J. Paul Hunter has drawn attention to ‘the intrusive politics that have disturbed so many readers of Tom Jones’, while Homer Obed Brown has argued that because the novel ‘places itself … on the outskirts of the events of the 1745 Rebellion in England … the meaning of this placing has always presented a problem for its interpretation’. More recently, John Allen Stevenson has bluntly asked what he calls ‘the central question’ – which is not simply why Fielding ‘decided to introduce the fact of the Forty-Five just here’ in the narrative, nor why he ‘waited so long to introduce the subject’ in Tom Jones, but ‘why has he not thought fit to mention it before?’

By posing the question in this way, Stevenson assumes that there must be a narrative, if not a political significance, in Fielding's decision, even though he cannot explain why