Narrative

1. This first book, volume three of the Novelists’s Magazine, was printed in 1791 for Harrison and Co. of London at No. 18 Paternoster Row. It contains two novels: The Tales of the Genii; or, the Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar (1764) by Sir Charles Morell; and The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) by Henry Fielding. The Novelists’s Magazine reprinted popular out-of-copyright works, thus capitalizing on the decision of the House of Lords in Donaldson v Beckett (1774), which denied the continued existence of a perpetual common law copyright and held that copyright was a creation of statute and could be limited in its duration, leaving many older novels unprotected by copyright.