First, one should note that the sentences in Tom Jones are not particularly long or complex for his period. Unfortunately, syntactic attention spans of English language readers and average sentence length have been declining over the past few centuries. What might appear a long or complex sentence to someone accustomed to tweets or textbooks written to an eighth-grade reading level standard is not necessarily long or complex by standards of readers accustomed to more sophisticated prose. As students develop their reading skills by sustained reading of complex prose, they become more comfortable with longer, more complex sentences.

In England in the eighteenth century, students learned Latin in school and were accustomed to Ciceronian sentences which might have dozens of subordinate clauses. This made them skilled readers of long sentences. The periodic style, which was based on symmetrical use of complex clausal structures with the most significant elements of the sentence withheld until the end, was widely admired and common in the period.

Finally, at times the language of the novel was deliberately inflated for comic, mock-epic effect.