Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) seems to be a novel about judgement. Fielding introduces his hero as born to be hanged and his occupations as both magistrate and novelist apparently impacted the novel with themes of crime and punishment, which is why it is a key text in law and literature research. As an early bildungsroman, the novel seems designed to reveal the moral virtues of its hero and the reader is invited to judge him through all the pitfalls that present themselves to an 18th-century young man of uncertain class affiliation. His progress is overshadowed by the looming gallows and the narrator’s extensive metafictional commentary emphasises the young man’s innate virtues on the one hand and the need for prudence on the other. Hence, Fielding’s roles as author and magistrate seem to intertwine, as he was fictionally, theoretically and judicially concerned with crime. Moreover, the narrator’s extensive metafictional commentary evokes both the author’s and the reader’s moral judgement of Tom’s actions. However, this paper shows that the equation of Henry Fielding, the novelist, and Henry Fielding, the magistrate, is likely to cause a misreading of his most famous novel.