The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling by buying Henry Fielding | Antique Rainbow Marbled Hardcover Set | English Comic Novel

Undated, circa turn of the century, complete two volume edition published by Hovendon Company, New York. John Hovendon bought International Book Co. during the 1890s and renamed it Hovendon Company. The page buying numbering in Volume I is in error. Pages are in sequential order through Chapter VIII, Page 366. The next page, which begins Chapter IX, starts at Page 15. Content does not appear to be affected. Volume II is 376 pp. Quarter calf over marbled boards. All edges marbled with marbled endpapers. Backstrips are detached on right-hand side and need to be glued. Piece of leather missing from top of backstrip on Volume I. Slight wear around edges. Marginalia on title page of both volumes. Light tanning. Pages are otherwise crisp and clean.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on February 28, 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel.[1] It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book, "Great Novelists and Their Novels" among the ten best novels of the world. The novel is highly organized despite its length. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned", alongside Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist. It became a best seller with four editions published in its first year alone. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel