Quotes from Henry Fielding's books, and about them
Joseph Andrews on Philotas: “what could Booth or Betterton have made of such horrible stuff as Fenton's Mariamne, Frowd's Philotas, or Mallet's Eurydice”
Joseph Andrews on Don Quixote: “is not such a book as that which records the achievements of the renowned Don Quixote more worthy the name of a history than even Mariana's”
Northanger Abbey on Tom Jones: “…her question, but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."”
David Copperfield on Tom Jones: “From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company.”
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court on Tom Jones: “However, I had read "Tom Jones," and "Roderick Random," and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact…”
Lady Audley's Secret on Tom Jones: “There was an old Greek Testament and the Eton Latin Grammar; a French pamphlet on the cavalry sword-exercise; an odd volume of Tom Jones with one half of its stiff leather cover hanging to it by a thread; Byron's Don Juan, printed in a murderous type, which must have been invented for the special…”
The Education of Henry Adams on Tom Jones: “He liked her refined figure; her gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old binding, labelled "Peregrine Pickle" or "Tom Jones" or "Hannah More."”
Jacob's Room on Tom Jones: “the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer... She bought Tom Jones.”
Ann Veronica on Tom Jones: “It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne, Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl.”