Tom Jones

by Henry Fielding, Fredson Bowers (Editor), Martin C. Battestin (Introduction)

Overview

Tom, a foundling, is discovered one evening by the benevolent Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget and brought up as a son in their household; when his sexual escapades and general misbehavior lead them to banish him, he sets out in search of both his fortune and his true identity. Amorous, high-spirited, and filled with what Fielding called “the glorious lust of doing good,” but with a tendency toward dissolution, Tom Jones is one of the first characters in English fiction whose human virtues and vices are realistically depicted. This edition is set from the text of the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812966077
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/10/2002
Series:	Modern Library Classics Series
Pages:	1024
Sales rank:	209,308
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.45(d)

About the Author

Fredson Bowers was a professor of literature at the University of Virginia for more than forty years and a preeminent textual critic.

Martin C. Battestin is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia and a leading scholar on Henry Fielding. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction		ix	(26)
Note on the Text		xxxv	(1)
Select Bibliography		xxxvi	(4)
A Chronology of Henry Fielding		xl	(5)
Map: Tom Jones's Journey through England and the Jacobite Invasion of 1745		xlv	(1)
Map of London		xlvi
TOM JONES		1	(872)
Explanatory Notes		873

What People are Saying About This

George Sherburn

Not the serious moral intention of the author, nor even the superb fusion of all elements, can fully account for the pleasure intelligent readers have found for two hundred years in reading Tom Jones. One must recognize as a supreme aid to the success of the book the fact that it is composed with confident directness and precision, and especially that it is written in healthy high spirits—that Fielding keenly enjoyed writing it.

Edward Gibbon

The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Upon my word, I think Tom Jones is one of the most perfect plots ever planned.

Editorial Reviews

Two hundred years have not dimmed Fielding’s realism. His humor is closer to our own than that of any writer before the present century.”—Kingsley Amis

From the Publisher