THE FOLIO SOCIETY
BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Your price US$57.95
Production Details
Introduction by Jonathan Coe. Bound in cloth and printed with a design by Simon Brett. 720 pages. Illustrated with wood engravings by Derrick Harris. 9" x 5¾".
Jonathan Coe completed his PhD dissertation on Tom Jones. His fiction and non–fiction works have won numerous awards, including the Samuel Johnson prize in 2004.
‘Tom Jones feels as vital and as brilliant as ever. It is at once a love story, an incisive comedy of manners, and a portrait of mid–18th–century British society on an epic scale. Above all, this is a novel suffused (in the words of Henry James) with its author’s ‘fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style.’. One of the first modern English novels also remains one of the greatest.’ Jonathan Coe
In a plot described by Coleridge as ‘one of the three most perfect ever planned’, bringing together a wonderfully comic cast of characters, Henry Fielding recounts the adventures of the foundling Tom as he strives to resist the temptations of drinking and wenching in order to be worthy of his true love, Sophia Western – admittedly, with mixed success. For all his faults, Tom is always honest – unlike his rival for Sophia’s hand, the hypocritical and repulsive Blifil. As Fielding says in his own introduction, ’the provision which we have here is no other than human nature’.
‘The prose Homer of human nature’ LORD BYRON
Tom Jones is widely acknowledged as Fielding’s masterpiece. First published in 1749, within a year it had been translated into 3 languages. It is impossible not to empathise with its fallible hero, and, in Sophia Western, Fielding created a heroine, based on his own beloved wife Charlotte – who, whilst virtuous, is no simpering waif. Set against the background of the Jacobite rebellion, Tom Jones resonated with its contemporary audience. Today’s reader can take equal pleasure in its good nature, good sense and ebullient humour.
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