Tom Jones: De Lotgevallen Van Een Vondeling
1749
Tom Jones: De Lotgevallen Van Een Vondeling
1749
Translated by M. P. (Mark Prager) Lindo
The first great English novel, and still one of the funniest. Henry Fielding's masterpiece follows Tom Jones, a foundling raised by the wealthy and virtuous Mr. Allworthy, as he tumbles through every layer of 18th-century English society. Tom is generous, hot-headed, and sexually prolific; he's also, we come to realize, genuinely good in ways that his respectable critics are not. Fielding gives us a sprawling picaresque adventure: a road trip through Georgian England populated by roguish squires, scheming parsons, seduced milkmaids, and insufferable bluestockings. The comedy is bawdy and sharp, but beneath it lies a serious question: what makes a person virtuous, and does it matter more than birth or breeding? This is a book that invented the English novel and still reads like a revelation.
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“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.””
— Henry Fielding
“For I hope my Friends will pardon me, when I declare, I know none of them without a Fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine, I had any Friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness, of this Kind, we give and demand in Turn.””
— Henry Fielding
“It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.””
— Henry Fielding
“Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any further together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever; and here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs or works which no ways concern them; for till they produce the authority by which they are constituted judges, I shall not plead to their jurisdiction.””
— Henry Fielding
“A good countenance is a letter of recommendation.””
— Henry Fielding
“Men who are ill-natured and quarrelsome when drunk are very worthy persons when sober. For drink in reality doth not reverse nature or create passions in men which did not exist in them before. It takes away the guard of reason and consequently forces us to produce those symptoms which many when sober have art enough to conceal.””
— Henry Fielding
“There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.””
— Henry Fielding
“And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a-- for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.””
— Henry Fielding
“To see a Woman you love in Distress; to be unable to relieve her, and at the same Time to reflect that you have brought her into this Situation, is, perhaps, a Curse of which no Imagination can represent the Horrors to those who have not felt it.””
— Henry Fielding
