Tom Jones concluded

Finished Tom Jones today. There was one bit that reminded me of Wodehouse, of all things, where Tom has to get out of a romantic entanglement. The solution is for him to propose marriage, knowing that the woman will reject it. Of course, in a Wodehouse story this wouldn't have worked; in Tom Jones it sort of does.

We start book 17 at Tom's lowest point, almost. He's in jail for murder, Sophia hates him (and is about to be married against her will), and he's about to find out that he's committed incest. Fielding then has a chapter which essentially says, "Things are really black for our hero, and there's pretty much no way out, since I've promised you not to use a deus ex machina." Of course, we know that things will work out, since this is a comedy, and so we know that Fielding is toying with us when he says that we may as well stop reading now, since he'll probably just have Tom killed off.

Fielding then concludes with about a dozen sudden revelations--Allworthy realizes that Tom always esteemed him, Sophie learns the truth of Tom's engagement, Tom learns that he is not actually on trial for murder, and we the readers finally learn who Tom's parents actually were.
It's easy to mock this style of resolution now--it became a staple of Dickens' fiction, along with other Victorian novelists. But I wonder what Fielding's audience thought at the time. For that matter, I wonder what Fielding intended--he's promised us no deus ex machina (which promise he literally keeps, but certainly not the spirit), but he also says that his last book (with all its resolutions) is very serious, that he doesn't have time in it for the raillery of the previous books. And yet, this is arguably the most comic book of the whole work, in the old-fashioned sense, where comic means a happy ending.

Again and again, Fielding affects to present a history--he calls it a history, he tells us that he can't know certain things, and so on. At the same time, he also subverts the realism of the book with his commentary on the action--when he says that he's now put his hero in an impossible position, and that he (Fielding) can't possibly get him (Jones) out of trouble, he's reminding us that Fielding is the omnipotent author, who can in fact do whatever he wants.