Anyone who’s familiar with contemporary English-language novels would have little trouble reading a novel published in the 1700s in an original edition. By the middle of that century, conventions related to printed text and punctuation were starting to look almost modern.

Almost, but not quite. One of the best examples of this is a British novel called The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding, as first published in 1749. Thanks to Google scans from the University of Michigan (and hosted by HathiTrust), we can examine its pages today.

How close was it to Chicago style? What are some of the conventions left behind?

The History of Tom Jones

To keep this overview from getting too long (Tom Jones itself is more than a thousand pages in modern one-volume editions), I’ve zeroed in on a single two-page spread that contains a mix of dialogue and narration.

Here are pages 56 and 57 from volume 5, book 13, chapter 7 of the six-volume edition published in London in 1749 (those links are to the scans at HathiTrust, which can be downloaded from there as individual pages in various formats, including PDF):

This is a scene from a masquerade where Tom Jones (the foundling in the book’s title, now an adult) talks to “the Mask,” a woman he (wrongly, as it turns out) assumes to be Harriet Fitzpatrick, while hoping to find her cousin Sophia Western among the other masked attendees.

What’s Familiar?

The page setup is mostly conventional (if a bit warped and discolored in these scans), from the page numbers and running heads to the paragraphs with first-line indents. The punctuation marks are also mostly familiar. Here’s a summary:

Page numbers. The page numbers are in the upper left corner on the verso (left-hand page) and the upper right corner on the recto (right-hand page). That’s still the most common placement for page numbers (see CMOS 1.6).

Running heads. Like the running heads in many contemporary novels (see CMOS 1.12), the ones in Tom Jones feature the book’s title. Splitting it across verso and recto and including the book and volume number (each volume of Tom Jones is divided into several numbered “books”) may be slightly unconventional, but it works.

Paragraph indents. Each paragraph features a first-line indent of what looks like an em space, a convention that’s followed in most books today (CMOS still tells authors to format their manuscripts with first-line paragraph indents; see CMOS 2.15).

Sentence punctuation (mostly). Commas, periods, and question marks are used much as they are today, though there are several commas that most of us would edit out, like the one before “than” at the top of page 56. The dashes on page 56 are also a bit unconventional—later editions of Tom Jones tended to make them the same length, sometimes eliminating one or both. And the semicolons and colon in our sample are used more loosely than they would be today; the semicolon after “Entreaties” in the middle of page 56, however, follows Chicago style (see CMOS 6.60).

Spelling. Setting aside the initial capitals for nouns and the long s’s (see next section), every word on these two pages is spelled as it would be today, with three exceptions: shew (or ſhew) for show near the top of page 56, the contraction cry’d for cried toward the middle of that same page, and Expence with a c near the top of page 57. Or four exceptions if you count the British Honour two lines below cry’d.

What’s Different?

Now for the fun stuff. There are several stylistic differences in Tom Jones compared with the typical novel published today. Each one was intended to benefit either the printers and binders making the book or the readers following its text, but most of them have long fallen out of fashion. Here are the highlights:

Proper names are in italics. In our sample, this usage is limited to the names of people (but not their social titles): Jones and Sophia, Miss Western, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Elsewhere in the book you’ll find that place-names and the adjectives derived from them are also italicized (e.g., Hanover-Square, England—and English). If you’ve ever flipped through the pages of a long novel looking for a scene involving a particular character or place, you’ll know how difficult that can be; the italics probably made that task a little easier.

Nouns are capitalized. The italics for Jones and Sophia and Western and Fitzpatrick mentioned above also help to differentiate these names from ordinary nouns, all of which are spelled with an initial cap (“Name,” “Companion,” etc.). This practice was once fairly common in English (and remains the rule in German; see CMOS 11.42).

Quotation marks at the left margin. The quotation marks are the most distinctive (and innovative) thing about our sample. Single quotation marks are still a common feature of British style, but what’s different about these is how the opening mark is repeated at the beginning of each new line for the duration of a character’s speech (sometimes running for an entire page or longer). If you’ve ever lost track of whether you’re in dialogue or narrative, you’ll appreciate this nicety. But these stacked quotation marks must have been a royal pain in the neck to typeset; they were mostly gone by the time 1800 rolled around. (Modern conventions for presenting fictional dialogue, including the use and nonuse of quotation marks, are covered in CMOS 12.39–53.)

Extra space between paragraphs. You’d think the publishers of such a long book would have wanted to save paper wherever possible, but those blank lines between paragraphs are helpful—and will be familiar to anyone who reads HTML text online (this post is an example of that). You might even say this style has come back in style (except for the first-line indents, which are less common in HTML unless you count ebooks, most of which are based on EPUB, a format that relies on [X]HTML). For the section breaks that many novels feature today—a somewhat different use of blank lines between paragraphs—see “Space Breaks in Fiction” at CMOS Shop Talk.

Extra space next to punctuation. Extra space relative to just about every mark of punctuation would remain the rule in published books all the way into the twentieth century—including between sentences (as before “And do you think” in the middle of page 57). This liberal approach to spacing was still what was recommended when the first edition of CMOS was published in 1906, but the eleventh edition (1949) specified uniform spacing everywhere (see “One Space or Two?” at CMOS Shop Talk).

Strange s’s. Publications from the 1700s and before are often recognizable from the peculiar appearance of the lowercase letter s. Except at the end of a word, an s was typically represented by the archaic long s, or ſ—which to me always looks like an f (ſeriouſly!). (Maybe for that reason, a regular s would be used next to an f, as in the word Satisfaction, which also gets an initial capital in Tom Jones because it’s a noun.) And though the long s is defined for Unicode (as U+017F), writers normally convert these to regular s’s in quoted text (see CMOS 12.7, item 7).

Ligatures. Speaking of Unicode, only a handful of ligatures—two-letter combinations joined as one (see this glossary entry in CMOS)—are defined as characters in Unicode. These include the common ligatures with f, including ff and fi, both of which appear in our Tom Jones sample (as in “ſuffer” and “find”), and both of which are in common use today. But if you’re looking for one of those cute ct ligatures with the connecting loop—as in the word “Act” near the bottom of page 57—you won’t find it in Unicode (this thread at Unicode’s FAQ page explains why). Not to worry: If you have the right font (the antique-looking open-source font IM Fell English, designed by Igino Marini, is one), a program like Adobe InDesign will turn the combination “ct” into a ligature if you ask it to (among others, including with long s); even Microsoft Word supports these so-called historical ligatures (under Font > OpenType Features > Ligatures).

In the detail above (from the bottom of page 57 of Tom Jones), note the looping ct ligature in the word “Act” (twice). Also note the long s in the words “same,” “must,” “yourself,” and “Madness”; the signature notation “D 5”; and the catchword “as.”

Catchwords. Another obvious sign that you’re reading an older book is the use of catchwords. These are the words printed at the bottom right of each page, after the final line of text; they anticipate the word that will begin the next page—like “before” at the bottom of page 56 and “as” at the bottom of page 57 (note how the punctuation is included). Catchwords helped printers and binders keep track of page order. But if you’ve ever turned a page in a book only to flip right back to make sure that you are in fact on the right page (and haven’t turned two or more by mistake), you’ll appreciate catchwords from a reader’s perspective (especially the one on the right-hand page).

Signature numbers. That “D 5” at the bottom of page 57 tells us which signature that page belongs to; this information, like catchwords, helped printers and binders put the pages in the right order. A signature, then as now, is one of the sheets from a printing press that’s folded and bound into a book, but most books don’t show signature numbers anymore.

The End of an Era

By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the features listed under the heading “Different” had begun to disappear. For example, a reader of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, printed in London in 1811 (a scan is available at Google Books), would find only the catchwords and signature numbers—and the spaces next to punctuation. But except for all the extra spacing, that 1811 text by Jane Austen is very close to Chicago style. All we need to do is bring back catchwords (though maybe only on the recto).

Top image: IM Fell English font (Google version) as rendered in Microsoft Word on a “stationery” page background and with ligatures enabled.

Page images: Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (London, 1749), vol. 5, bk. 13, pp. 56–57, from HathiTrust.

Editor’s Corner posts at Shop Talk reflect the opinions of its authors and not necessarily those of The Chicago Manual of Style or the University of Chicago Press.

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Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style. He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

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