The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
A lot of people enjoy recently written novels about people like themselves, people who live at roughly the same time, and do and say roughly the same sorts of things that they do. Borrowing from a quip Eliot Weinberger dropped in an interview —"I don't want to read about divorce in the suburbs, I can make a phone call and hear about that."—I can't help but think of these kinds of books as "divorce in the suburbs novels." Of course if that's the sort of thing those people enjoy, they should go right ahead in their search for the next Corrections . (I don't really remember what that novel was about—does anybody?—but it's a safe bet it contained at least one suburban divorce.) For some of us, though, fiction provides a way to expand our worlds, to move beyond the people and places we know to different places, different cultures, different times. Published in 1749, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones takes us to Augustan England, and as some other old ti...