Fielding, Henry

FIELDING, HENRY

FIELDING, HENRY (1707–1754), English novelist and playwright. Fielding was born 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, Somerset, and the family moved to East Stour in Dorset three years later. His father, Edmund, was a lieutenant who was reckless with money, and his mother, Sarah Gould, was a judge's daughter. Edmund Fielding remarried in 1718 after Sarah's death, and Fielding was educated at Eton, where he developed a love of the Greek and Roman classics. In 1728, he moved to London, where he published his first work, an ode on King George II's birthday, a satirical poem, "The Masquerade," and his first play, Love in Several Masques. From 1728 to 1729 he studied law at the University of Leiden, but returned to London because his father's increasing extravagance had left Fielding penniless. He supported himself by writing for the stage; between 1729 and 1737 he wrote twenty-five comedies and satires that were passionately engaged with exposing the vices of the court, politics, and society of the 1720s and 1730s. Fielding's first success, The Author's Farce, reflects on his own difficult financial position. In 1734 he married Charlotte Craddock, and they lived in lodgings in the Strand in London with their two children. His other successes at the Little Theatre, Haymarket (which he managed) included Tom Thumb (1730) and The Grub Street Opera (1731). His political satires Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737) provoked the government of Prime Minister Robert Walpole to pass the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737, which banned political satire on the stage, thereby ending Fielding's career as a playwright.

Returning to the study of the law, Fielding was admitted to the bar in 1740. He also established the satirical periodical Champion (1739–1741). In 1741 his debts caused him to be detained in a bailiff's sponging-house (a preliminary detention center before prison), where he wrote Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, an attack on novelist Samuel Richardson's concept of "virtue rewarded" in his novel Pamela (1740). Shamela parodied Richardson's epistolary style, revealing Shamela's "virtue" or "vartue" to be a weapon of self-interest and gain.

Fielding's talent for comic ridicule blossomed further with Joseph Andrews (1742), described by Fielding as a "comic epic-poem in prose" (Preface). Fielding attacked Richardson's schematic moral simplicity by inverting gender—Joseph is the victim of the lustful Lady Booby—and by the panoply of characters Joseph encountered with his quixotic friend Parson Adams. The novel's originality lies with its self-consciousness as fiction and the strong authorial presence of an omniscient narrator introducing each chapter and controlling the pace and plot.

In 1743, Fielding published the successful Miscellanies including A Journey from this World to the Next and Jonathan Wild (revised and republished in 1754), based on the life of a Machiavellian gangster living in the 1720s. After Fielding's wife died in 1744, his sister, Sarah Fielding, who was also a writer, managed his household until he married his wife's former servant, Mary Daniel, in 1747. Meanwhile Fielding produced two anti-Jacobite newspapers, The True Patriot (1745–1746) and The Jacobite's Journal (1747–1748).

The epic scale of Fielding's art reached its apex with Tom Jones (1749). He commented in the dedication that ". . . to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history." Fielding's attitude to morality, judgment, justice, and honor in depicting the life of his eponymous orphan hero revealed his realism. He challenged the reader's judgment with the complexity of his characterization, for example in the female characters who test Tom's honor, ranging from the idealized Sophia to the sexually avaricious Molly Seagrim to the conniving socialite Lady Bellaston. Samuel Johnson found the moral ambiguity of the novel troubling.

Fielding's experience as a justice of the peace (for Westminster in 1748 and for Middlesex in 1749) and as chairman of the quarter sessions of Westminster, where justices of the peace for Westminster met to discuss petty crime, shaped his last, rather sentimental, novel, Amelia (1751). The novel sympathetically portrayed how Amelia and her husband, Captain Booth, suffered from institutionalized injustice in the military, the aristocracy, and the court of law. Accused of losing the comedy of his earlier novels, Fielding responded in his satirical periodical The Covent-Garden Journal that he would write no more fiction.

In his final years, Fielding's determination to suppress crime and administer justice led him to assist his half-brother, Sir John Fielding, in establishing the "Bow Street Runners," an embryonic police force, while writing on contemporary legal debates (1749–1752). In 1754 he sailed to Portugal in an attempt to improve his failing health and wrote The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (published posthumously in 1755). He died in Lisbon and was buried there.

See also English Literature and Language ; Richardson, Samuel .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Fielding, Henry. Amelia. Edited by David Blewett. London, 2001.

——. Jonathan Wild. Edited by David Nokes. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1982.

——. Joseph Andrews/Shamela. Edited by Judith Hawley. London, 1999.

——. A Journey from This World to the Next and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Edited by Ian A. Bell and Andrew Varney. Oxford and New York, 1997.

——. Tom Jones: The Authoritative Text, Contemporary Reactions, and Criticism. 2nd ed. Edited by Sheridan Baker. New York, 1995.

Secondary Sources

Battestin, Martin C., and Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London and New York, 1989. The standard expansive biography of Fielding by the most eminent scholar on Fielding.

Campbell, Jill. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels. Stanford, 1995. A study deconstructing critical assumptions about gender in Fielding's work by historicizing his fiction.

Pagliaro, Harold. Henry Fielding: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998. A thought-provoking biography examining the relation between Fielding's work as a lawyer, magistrate, and political essayist and his fiction and drama.

Uglow, Jenny. Henry Fielding. Plymouth, U.K., 1995. A useful introduction to the life and major works.

Max Fincher