The History of Tom Jones

by Henry Fielding

Published 1 January 1977
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Joseph Andrews

by Henry Fielding

Published 1 April 1958
A new edition of a satire on Richardson's PAMELA, featuring the character of Parson Adams. With explanatory notes by A R Humphreys.

Amelia

by Henry Fielding

Published 13 January 1978

With its combination of satire and sentiment, its focus on the seedy side of London life, and its unexpected shifts in tone, Amelia has intrigued and disturbed readers since its first publication. Eagerly awaited by Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century readers of Tom Jones, the novel perplexed many of them. Amelia counters the traditional courtship plot of eighteenth-century novels with its convincing portrayal of a marriage between an errant husband and his wife, and is ahead of its time in its depiction of the alienation of modern city life.

Appendices include contemporary criticism and related works by Alexander Pope and Sarah Fielding.


The Wesleyan edition of Tom Jones is widely acknowledged as the best available, and this new paperback reproduces the handsomely composed text and notes of that edition. A new Critical Introduction, a brief chronology of Fielding's life, and a selected bibliography of relevant criticism especially designed for student use have been added. The map - A Geography of Tom Jones - has been retained, while the General and Textual Introduction and six bibliographical Appendices of the two volume clothbound edition have been omitted.

"This edition offers a critical unmodernized text of Tom Jones. The text is critical in that it has been established by application of analytical criticism to the evidence of the various documentary forms in which the novel has appeared. It is unmodernized in that every effort has been made to present the text in as close a form to Fielding's own inscription and final revision as the surviving documents permit, subject only to normal editorial regulations." - from the Textual Introduction

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++Harvard University Houghton LibraryN011111The collective titlepage appears only in vol. 1. Each volume has a separate titlepage with an imprint reading the same as that of the collective titlepage: 'Miscellanies, by Henry Fielding Esq; Vol. I. The second edition.'; 'Miscellanies, by Henry Fielding Esq; Vol. II. A journey from this world to the next, and 'Miscellanies. The life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. Vol. III. By Henry Fielding, Esq; The second edition.'.London: printed for A. Millar, 1743. 3v.; 8

As Henry Fielding's last effort at sustained journalism, the Covent-Garden Journal (1752) significantly reflects the literary, moral, and social ideas of a major novelist in the final years of his life. Freed from the burden of political propagandizing which had dominated his earlier journalism, Fielding here addressed himself directly to social satire, literary criticism, and moral instruction in essays that are strikingly rooted in the everyday life of mid-century
London. The Journal is thus an essential text not only for students of Fielding but for anyone concerned with the social and literary history of the period.

The general introduction explains the connection between the Journal and the brief pamphlet A Plan of the Universal Register-Office (1751) and places them in Fielding's career; it then describes the journalistic background, major themes, and immediate reception of the Covent-Garden Journal. Full explanatory notes are provided for all topical and historical allusions.

The text of the Plan has not been reprinted since the eighteenth century. The present text of the Journal, incorporating a recent discovery of revisions in Fielding's hand, offers in an appendix a column about Fielding's magistracy not previously reprinted. Other appendices provide a complete record of all textual amendations.

A scholarly edition of works by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of works by Henry Fielding. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This is the second volume of Fielding's Miscellanies, first published as a three-volume set in 1743. Its major work is the fantasy A Journey from This World to the Next, Fielding's richest and most extensive piece of prose fiction outside his three novels and Jonathan Wild. Its theme, described by Gibbon as `the history of human nature', is the excoriation of false greatness and over-weening ambition, one of the great moral ideas of the
age. The annotation and commentary to this edition present new evidence about Fielding's manipulation of historical sources in the Journey, which is shown to be both artistically complete and thematically consistent with the other material in the Miscellanies.

The remaining two works in this volume are both plays which Fielding included at a late stage of planning for the book: the farce Eurydice, a burlesque of mythological figures who function as vehicles for topical satire, and The Wedding Day, a revision of an intrigue comedy written early in his career but staged for the first time in 1743, only a few months before the Miscellanies appeared.

The introduction reviews this period of Fielding's career and describes the circumstances leading up to the original publication of Miscellanies by subscription, and the historical and biographical contexts of the works included in Volume Two. The text follows the significant features of the 1743 presentation, as far as possible; the Greg-Bowers `Rationale' hitherto observed in the Wesleyan Edition is refined and augmented by more recent textual theorizing. The full,uncensored text of
The Wedding Day, from Larpent MS 39 in the Huntington Library, is given as an appendix to the censored form published in Miscellanies.

Henry Fielding - Plays

by Henry Fielding

Published 18 March 2004
This is the first of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in edited form. Fielding came to the novel-writing for which he is best known after an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an
experimentalist and entrepreneur in a cheerfully mocking form of drama journalistically devoted to contemporary experience, culture, and politics. This volume presents the first seven of these plays in a critical unmodernized edition based on the original texts, with explanatory notes and commentary on
sources, stage history, and critical reception, as well as appendices accounting for textual variation, bibliography, and musical sources.

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings provides critical unmodernized texts of Henry Fielding's legal and social pamphlets during the period 1749 to 1753, when Fielding served as magistrate for the City and Liberty of Westminster and County of Middlesex. The texts, for the first time, are fully annotated, and a lengthy introduction places them in their biographical and intellectual context, and provides a detailed account of their publication and reception. Five of the six pamphlets included in this volume clearly serve the interests of the Pelham Administration. There is, however, no evidence to show that Fielding wrote any of the pamphlets at the invitation or command of figures of power within the Pelham Administration; instead he appears simply to have seized those opportunities appropriate to his office to further government interests or, as with An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) and A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753), offered his own solutions to problems which Parliament was currently debating.

This volume completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, which occupied a far greater part of his time than has been traditionally acknowledged. His contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a dense political background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers.
Walpole figures hugely, and the extent to which Fielding hints at the minister's life and activities is remarkable.

Much of the volume's material has never been reprinted before. Explanatory annotations are full, as the characteristically allusive and topical nature of Fielding's writing requires. Appendices provide an analytical textual apparatus, and the editorial introductions emphasize matters such as genesis and composition, circumstances of publication, in addition to immediate biographical, literary, and historical backgrounds.

A substantial amount of the energy which Henry Fielding put into his writing was invested in political journalism and political pamphleteering. Indeed, next to his prose fiction and his plays, his political journalism looms largest in bulk, and reveals significant aspects of Fielding the man.
Te present volume contains three pamphlets -; the Serious Address, the History of the Present Rebellion, and the Dialogue Between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender -; and one journal, the True Patriot of 1745-6. Coming from what may be called the second period of Fielding's intensive political journalism, they are all informed by the same political purpose: to deal with the crisis represented by the Jacobite uprising known as the 'Forty-Five' and with the implications this event was perceived to have or the Pelham administration in particular.
As usual with the Wesleyan Edition, there is a detailed introduction, a textual introduction, textual apparatus, and full annotation throughout the texts, as well as an index.

CONTRIBUTORS: W.B. Coles.

Volume Three of Henry Fielding's Miscellanies, first published as a three-volume set in 1743, consists in its entirety of a major work of fiction, The history of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. Jonathan Wild takes its title from the `thief-taker' and gang-leader of that name who was hanged in 1725, but in Fielding's hands, the history of Wild is transformed into a mock-hostorical work of sustained irony aimed at all who would be
`great men'.
The general introduction to this edition sets the novel against its historical and biographical background and argues against the view, common since the mid-nineteenth century, that it is a personal satire directed at the figure of Sir Robert Walpole. In both the general and the textual introductions, the editors also offer a fresh view on questions about the date and history of the work's composition. Full explanatory notes and commentary place Fielding's allusions and details in their
contemporary context.
As in previous volumes of the Weslyan Edition, this provides critical, unmodernized text, based on the Greg-Bowers `Rationale of Copy-text'. The version is that of the first edition, with an appendix giving all variants in wording and presentation in the 1754 revision. In his introduction the textual editor lays out the rationale for his choice of version. This volume also includes, for the first time in modern edition, Fielding's list of subscribers to the Miscellanies, along with
detailed biographical notes and an analysis of the subscription list by the textual editor.