Tom Jones as a Children's Book in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Tom Jones as a Children's Book in the Eighteenth Century Samuel F. Pickering Jr. (bio) In 1810, John Harris advertised The Pocket Library as "most happily adapted for presents to young Persons." Among the volumes in the Library were Hudibras, The Spiritual Quixote, Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, The Works of Horace, Milton's Poetical Works, Ovid's Epistles, The Adventures of Roderick Random, and The History of Tom Jones. Although some older children might have benefitted from The Pocket Library, none of the books were "adapted" to the understanding of young children, and Harris's claim notwithstanding, the volumes of the Library seem more suitable as presents for adults than for young persons. Indeed in 1809, Harris himself had advertised an abridged edition of Tom Jones especially for children (Moon, p. 150-2). First published by Francis Newbery in 1768, this edition later became part of Elizabeth Newbery's list. Although Newbery's Tom Jones was reprinted by at least three publishers in the United States before 1800, it is almost impossible to gauge its popularity among children; and to my mind, even this edition seems directed more at adults than children. Although Fielding's witty critical chapters and learned digressions were deleted in order to make the novel more of an adventure story, little was done to simplify the language, and the book seems a hurried scissors and paste abridgement. Despite the removal of thoughtful episodes like Tom's meeting with the Old Man of the Hill, the novel is lengthy and remains crammed with incidents which are likely to appeal more to the understanding of adults than to that of children. Tom remains "naturally inclined to gallantry" and at Upton, for example, still enjoys the pleasures of Mrs. Waters's bed. But the expansion at the end of the eighteenth century of the trade in books which were, in Locke's words, "fit to engage the liking of Children" (Axtell, p. 260) meant that children and adults, particularly those in the growing middle classes, no longer shared the same literature. With the general acceptance of Locke's beliefs that people were made good or evil, useful or not, by education, and that childhood reading was an important part of that education, middle class parents frequently selected their children's reading on the basis of its supposedly formative value. Good numbers of such parents, and certainly the parents of young children, probably found Newbery's Tom Jones wanting. So if they ever purchased a Tom Jones for their children, they probably bought The Remarkable History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, an educationally "correct" thirty page edition of the novel. In The Lounger, Henry MacKenzie discussed the danger of reading novels. Particularly dangerous to youth, he wrote, was "that character of mingled virtue and vice which is to be found in some of the best of our Novels," a description which might well apply to Fielding's Tom. "It is dangerous," MacKenzie continued, "to bring us into the society of Vice, though introduced or accompanied by Virtue. In the application to ourselves, in which the moral tendency of all imaginary characters must be supposed to consist, this nourishes and supports a very common kind of self-deception, by which men are apt to balance their faults by consideration of their good qualities." In general, characters in late eighteenth century children's books were allegorical in their didacticism. Although books often depicted the reformation of bad children and the corruption of good children, few characters of "mingled virtue and vice" appeared. In the short version of Tom Jones, Tom is no longer Fielding's man of sensibility, so wonderfully passionate and so susceptible to passion; instead he is simply a virtuous boy. As Locke taught that a proper education could determine both moral and economic success, so Tom's marriage to Sophy seems the natural reward for a virtuous childhood. The child's version of Tom Jones begins with Mr. Allworthy's discovery of Tom and his determination to raise him with his nephew "Blifill" and "not make the least distinction between the two boys." Although the suspicion which falls on Molly Jones results in Tom's surname, Tom...