Reader discussion: History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Public reader discussion about History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the WeRead Catalog by Henry Fielding.

Question about Fielding’s Tom Jones

By Silent-Fox2002

Hi! I’m planning to start Henry Fielding’s *Tom Jones* soon. I’ve got a copy that belonged to my grandmother, and it was published in 1935. I’m wondering though—how likely is it that it’s been bowdlerized? I know *Fanny Hill* and Pepys’ diaries didn’t really get proper uncut editions until later in the 20th century. Did *Tom Jones* get treated the same way, or were readers back then less bothered by whatever’s in it compared to those other books?

Suggest your 1-3 most obscure, beloved books

By cosmiccat4595

I’m super curious what everyone’s less-famous picks are. I tried to make mine “scientific-ish” by going by the lowest Goodreads review counts (which… okay, I know) and then forcing myself to only pick 3, even though that was painfully hard. **The Secret Life of Dilly McBean** by Dorothy Haas — I actually reread it as an adult and it still works. My brother and I must’ve read it a million times when we were little. **The Shades** by Betty Brock — I have to shout this out because I’ve been hunting for a copy for 25 years. If anyone owns one, please let me know! I basically destroyed my elementary school copy. **Ain’t Nobody Nobody** by Heather Harper Elliott — big shout to libraries for this one. I grabbed it because it was just sitting out on display, and I ended up loving it. There’s nothing like finding something like that by accident. Would love to hear everyone’s hidden gems, any genre is fine. Also, if you’re into horror, **Paperbacks from Hell** by Grady Hendrix has been my go-to for years now for older, more obscure recommendations.

Week 27: What are you reading?

By BookmarkBookish65

Just finished last week: - *Lying in Wait* by Liz Nugent - *None of This is True* by Lisa Jewell - *The House on Needless Street* by Catriona Ward - *The Way the World Should End* by Diane Cook (for that bookclub mini) This week I’m starting/continuing: - *Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries* by Heather Fawcett — honestly it feels like it’s taking forever - *Equoid* by Charles Stross — short story, but the writing is weirdly good - *With Darkness Comes Winter* by Robbi Neal - *The Dentist* by Tim Sullivan - *Invisible Women* by Caroline Criado Perez

Do Americans know about Wales?

By EarlyTrail

I’m guessing most Americans know the basics about England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, but it kinda feels like Wales and Welsh culture aren’t as well known here. Is that actually true?

I recently read Tom Jones (1749)

By violetplate980

It took me more than a year to finish this book, mostly because I can’t read every day and when I do it’s usually just for an hour or so. It’s basically a bunch of books packed into one, so I don’t feel that bad about how long it took. I also ended up reading a lot of it out loud to myself just to take in the language. People did that for ages, so I guess I’m fine with that too. What I got from it: - Tom Jones is a shameless little bastard who stumbles into everything. He hooks up with even more women besides Sophia, and in the end she still takes him back without much fuss, even knowing what he did. Fielding says he didn’t stray after that, sure, but it still felt like nothing really happened to him because of any of it. Even Molly’s baby never really gets nailed down as his or the other guy’s. - Fielding really, really hates critics. The little bits at the start and end of the inner story were honestly my favorite parts of the whole book. A lot of what he says still feels true now, about critics acting like they know what works without actually making anything themselves. He’d wander off, talk straight to the reader, and lose track of the plot. Maybe that’s just because modern stories feel so boxed in with acts and arcs and all that, but it was kind of nice to have this big wandering story that could spend as much time on Partridge drinking as on the main romance. - Sophia having basically no control over her own life, barely any respect from her father, and getting chased down just because she chose to leave instead of marry Blifil is basically how women were treated until around the 1960s. The fact that this was written in the 1740s and has a really similar setup to It Happened One Night (1934) just makes it feel like there wasn’t much room for women to move up for like 200 years. I don’t even know exactly how I feel about that, it’s just something I noticed. - I’m relieved it wasn’t incest with his mother figure (that Mrs. Waters wasn’t actually his mother, just pretending for Bridget Alworthy, Blifil’s mother), but man, for a while there it was gross. - The part with Fitzpatrick was kind of unsatisfying because we only hear about him recovering from other people instead of getting it from him directly. It made me feel like Fielding had already checked out and just hurried the ending to get it over with. - That old philosopher guy out in the woods was my favorite. Honestly, I get why he hated people. - I had to dig out my Latin/English dictionary. The online Latin stuff wasn’t good enough for most of the Latin in the book, but my old dictionary from a used bookshop did the job. It really helps to know what Partridge is quoting, or badly quoting, and what the others are saying too. I might read it again sometime, but next time I’d want an annotated copy with the translations already there for me. - It still works pretty well. Yeah, women were basically property back then, but a lot of the jokes and scene setups still land. The innkeepers throughout the book, and how different they all are, are some of the easiest parts to get into. Like the one who’s worried all the women in Jones’ room will wreck the inn’s reputation, while another is only thinking about how much money he might get when he mistakes Sophia for a French noblewoman. - Lady Bellaston was a cougar. There, I said it. There’s more that I found funny or weird by today’s standards, but that’s the basic idea. Has anyone else read it? Any favorite parts? Favorite characters?

What was sex education like in the early 19th century?

By curiousbookworm

I just started watching Bridgerton on Netflix, and it’s set in early 1800s London. I get that it’s way more about drama than historical accuracy, but I can’t help wondering what parts are actually based on real life. Like, there’s a character who’s pregnant but not married, and the other girls act super clueless about how that could happen. They’re old enough to be thinking about getting married, but they basically don’t seem to know anything about sex or pregnancy at all. Were women really kept that uninformed back then, or is this just the show going all-in on shock value? And did it depend on what class they were in?

Has anyone read Fielding's Tom Jones?

By HardcoverVolume74

I got the Everyman edition as a gift, but there aren’t any notes at all. Then I noticed the Penguin version has notes—so do I actually need them? I’m excited to start it since I’ve heard so many good things. There’s also that quote about how Tom Jones will probably still be remembered long after the stuff around Charles V. and all that.

Tom Jones – Books 5 and 6. (If you feel left behind, catch up here with a 175-word summary of the novel so far.)

By black_bee1987

Tom Jones starts off with the usual setup: Tom, born out of wedlock, is taken in by Allworthy, this decent, wealthy, sensible man. Then Mrs Blifil has her son, and the two boys grow up together. Tom is warm and generous and easy to like, while Blifil is basically the opposite — sneaky, selfish, awful. Tom still cares about him though, and Allworthy hasn’t caught on to the hypocrisy yet. Then Molly, the gamekeeper’s daughter, who Tom’s family has already helped quite a bit, gets him into bed with her. She ends up pregnant, but it turns out the baby isn’t Tom’s. He means to do the honorable thing, but by then she’s already moved on to Square, one of their tutors. With Molly gone, Tom properly falls for Sophia, the lovely daughter of the nearby Squire. But Tom has no money, so marrying her is impossible. The Squire’s sister, though, thinks Tom is just acting badly and trying to steal Sophia away. Blifil jumps on that, feeds Allworthy a load of lies about Tom being depraved, and Allworthy believes him and kicks Tom out. (My 4800-word journal/summary of Books 1-6 is available here!) What that misses is just how much fun it is. It’s all farce and ridiculous turns and a hero who’s obsessed with sex, plus this weirdly icy villain, and the awful ending of Book 6 really does feel earned. It’s not funny at that point, but all the comic mix-ups and crazy incidents before it have been building toward it the whole time. People reading it in 1749 would’ve probably spotted the Garden of Eden parallel straight away: a third of the way into the novel’s eighteen “Books,” Tom gets cast out of Paradise because of his sins. Except… that’s not really what’s going on. Tom is one of the very few characters with no real evil in him; Allworthy is, unlike God, someone who can actually be tricked by bad people; and Paradise Hall isn’t paradise anyway, since that’s where the bad guys are. So what exactly is Fielding doing here? In 2012 Ali Smith, who really likes Modernism, said: One of the exciting things about the novel as a form is that it is traditionally revolutionary. She might as well have been talking about Tom Jones. Fielding keeps pushing what a novel can do, kind of like a 20th century Modernist. He takes familiar pieces and smashes them together into this made-up world of his own. There’s fairy tale stuff, Bible stuff, allegory, epic, farce — so we’re not expected to think any of it is literally true. But he still presents everything as if it all makes sense. Every character’s motives and actions get explained, and it’s so brilliant that we stop noticing how absurd the plot is, or else we just get swept along by all the wild twists. And then there are all the coincidences, good and bad accidents that either rescue Tom or land him in even deeper trouble. And moving along beside all that is the smooth narrator, Fielding as judge of taste and human nature and the human soul. It’s all a bit of a performance, but it’s such an entertaining one that we’re happy to stay with it. And, of course, sometimes it isn’t really a performance at all.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding [Unknown](Unknown)

By cloudyriver

Looks like this was picked because it’s considered historically/culturally important, and they tried to keep it as close to the original as they could. So yeah, you’ll probably still see old copyright notes, library stamps, and other random marks in it. It’s public domain in the U.S. at least, and maybe elsewhere too. Since it’s basically a reproduction of an old artifact, there may be missing pages, blurry images, weird spots, stuff like that. I guess they think it’s worth preserving and making available, and thanks for helping keep it around.

Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and parallels to the author’s life

By goldtower2872

I’m hoping this fits here, since I do really like this group a lot. I spent some time thinking about it, and I figured it might be interesting to anyone who’s read “Tom Jones,” which I just finished recently. It got me wanting to look more into Henry Fielding. One thing that stood out to me was how much Fielding’s own life seems tied up with the people in the novel, and even now it feels pretty easy to notice. Mr. Square, the stuck-up tutor, was apparently based on Fielding’s friend and enemy, the poet Thomas Cooke. He also pretty clearly says that Sophia was modeled on his first wife, Charlotte, who had died. And in the preface he says Mr. Allworthy was based on his own patron, George Lyttelton. He says that like it’s a compliment, but it probably isn’t all that flattering, since Allworthy is not really as good as he seems to think he is. Since Allworthy is Tom’s patron, and Lyttelton was Fielding’s patron, it kind of makes sense that Tom is Fielding. It would be pretty odd now for a writer to point out so directly who the characters are based on, so that feels like an interesting layer to the whole thing. I’m still curious about who Molly is supposed to be based on. Some people say Fielding’s second wife Mary, because of the class thing and the name similarity, but I’m not sure I buy that — I think the timing and cause would matter to Fielding. If anyone here knows Fielding well and has thoughts, I’d love to hear them, but either way I hope this is somewhat interesting. More people should read it. thanks again!

Possible early copy of "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling"

By AquaDog80

I’m kind of curious about this book and honestly I have no idea where to start, so please bear with me. I came across a really beat-up copy of the book in the title, and I don’t know if that means anything. It’s a hardcover and seems to have leather or something like that on it. The first page with actual writing has the title, and then says London: PRINTED FOR C. COOKE, no 17. Paternoster-row. I really don’t know what else to add, but feel free to ask me anything. http://imgur.com/a/Di7EW Pics of what the book looks like