Fielding, Henry

Fielding, Henry (1707–54), was educated at Eton where he made lifelong friends of Lyttelton, who later became a patron, and of Pitt the elder. In 1728 he became a student of letters at Leyden and later read for the bar at the Middle Temple. He settled in London determined to support himself as a dramatist, and between 1729 and 1737 wrote some 25 assorted dramas, largely in the form of farce and satire, including the most successful of all his dramas, Tom Thumb. In 1734 he married Charlotte Cradock who became his model for Sophia in Tom Jones and the heroine of Amelia. Fielding suffered long periods of poverty but was greatly assisted by Ralph Allen. In 1736 Fielding took over the management of the New Theatre, for the opening of which he wrote the successful satirical comedy Pasquin, which aimed at various religious and political targets, including electioneering abuses. But The Historical Register for 1736 was fiercer political satire than Walpole's government would tolerate, and the Licensing Act of 1737, introducing censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, brought Fielding's career in the theatre to an end.

In 1739–40 he wrote most of the columns of the Champion. In 1740 Richardson's Pamela appeared and enjoyed great popular success; Fielding expressed his contempt in his pseudonymous parody, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741). Meanwhile, increasing illness prevented Fielding from pursuing his legal career with any consistency. Instead he produced The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend, Mr Abraham Adams (1742). In 1743 Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, which included A Journey from This World to the Next and a ferocious satire, The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild the Great. His wife died in 1744 and in 1747 Fielding caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel. With the aid of Lyttelton, he was appointed JP for Westminster in 1748 and, in 1749 (the year in which Tom Jones appeared), his legal jurisdiction was extended to the whole county of Middlesex; he was made chairman of the quarter sessions of Westminster. From his court in Bow Street he continued his struggle against corruption and lawlessness and, with his blind half-brother and fellow magistrate Sir John Fielding, strove to establish new standards of honesty on the bench. He wrote various influential legal enquiries and pamphlets, including a proposal for the abolition of public hanging. He published Amelia (1751) and returned to journalism in 1752 with the Covent-Garden Journal. He organized and saw successfully implemented a plan for breaking up the criminal gangs who were then flourishing in London. In 1754, in the hope of improving his health, he left for Portugal. He died in Lisbon and his The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon was published posthumously in 1755.

Fielding is generally agreed to be an innovating master of the highest originality. He himself believed he was ‘the founder of a new province of writing’. His three acknowledged masters were Lucian, Swift, and Cervantes. In breaking away from the epistolary methods of his contemporary Richardson and others, he devised what he described as ‘comic epics in prose’, which are in effect the first modern novels in English, leading straight to the works of Dickens and Thackeray.