Histoire de Tom Jones (1751)
Description
Histoire de Tom Jones (1751)
Title Translated: History of Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Full Title: Histoire de Tom Jones, ou L'Enfant Trouvé. Traduction de l'Anglois de M. Fielding par L.D.L.P. [Pierre Antoine de La Place]. Enrichie d'estampes dessinées par M. Gravelot
Translated by Pierre-Antoine de la Place
6 ½ x 4. In French. Published by Chez Jean Nourse, a Londre, Paris, 1751. Third Edition. Four Volumes. Complete. Full mottled calf with gold-gilt border piping bordering covers. Above average wear to extremities. Boards a bit chafed (more so Volume I), and joints a bit rubbed and flaked, but solid overall. Corners only slightly bumped. Fully decorated gold-gilt spines, with maroon leather title and volume labels. Small split of about ¾” to the front tail joint of Volume 2. Marbled edges a shade less than bright. Marbled pastedowns and end papers free from ownership markings save for a neatly applied pictorial bookplate to Volumes 1 – 3, “Ex Libris, John G. Garvey” flanking an early printer using a Gutenberg-era press. Half-title page to each volume. Frontispiece to Volume 1 and 16 engraved plates by Gravelot engraved by Aveline, Chedel, Fessard et Pasquier throughout the set. Text mostly crisp and clean, despite slight imperfections such as occasional, light foxing, a slight stain, tiny tear, or other minor quirk that comes with a popular book this age. Early editions are NOT COMMONLY FOUND in the marketplace. (The image of the author we included on our website is NOT in the book.)
“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 both a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on February 28, 1749, in London, and is among the earliest English prose works to be classified as a novel. Pierre-Antoine de la Place (1707 – 93) became famous as the author of the compendious "Théâtre Anglais" (1745-48), in which several plays by Shakespeare first appeared in French. He also became a great admirer of Fielding. La Place "could not resist [however] the temptation to translate ['Tom Jones'] into his own language. The result was not so much a translation as an adaptation and abridgment, in keeping with what the French understood to be finely wrought narrative," a historian once wrote. Among other things, la Place cut down the novel by a third, frequently compressing the narrative and eliminating most of the initial chapters, which he saw as "preliminary discourses.” He argued that they were instructive and amusing but not an integral part of a novel. "Tom Jones" first appeared in French in 1750, only a year before this edition and two years after the first English publication.
Price: $795
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Inventory Number: 76151
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