Title: The History of Tom Jones. A Foundling. (Britannica: Great Books of the Western World)
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Year: 1952
Format: Hardcover
Condition: Like New
Weight: 628 g
Dimensions: 16.5 x 24 x 2 cm
Quarter-bound in fine brown leatherette (1952) over cloth boards, gilt spine, Smyth-sewn. Part of the Great Books of the Western World series by Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited with guidance from the University of Chicago.
"His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage". Ribald and rollicking, Tom Jones is Fielding's comic classic of a young man's coming-of-age. While recognized today as a landmark of the English novel, Dr. Johnson once observed, "I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make.
"Tom Jones: The History of a Foundling was originally published in 1749 in six volumes and revised by the author for a four-volume edition issued the same year. (Between 1749 and 1787 it appeared in translation in seven European countries; in 1872 it was translated into Czech, and in 1959 into Finnish.) Tom Jones was included in the first edition of Fielding's collected Works in 1762, inaccurately edited by Arthur Murphy, and reprinted three times by 1783. A complete edition of the novels, edited by Sir Walter Scott, was published in 1821. The ten-volume Shakespeare Head edition of Fielding was issued by Oxford University Press in 1926. An edition of Tom Jones illustrated by Rowlandson came out in Edinburgh in 1805, and a London edition illustrated by Cruikshank in 1831. George Saintsbury edited it for Everyman's Library in 1909.
