Fielding, Henry

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), English novelist, playwright, journalist, and barrister, credited with his contemporary Samuel Richardson for establishing the tradition of the English novel.

Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, Somerset, educated at Eton College, and studied law in London and at the University of Leiden. From 1729 to 1737 he was a theatrical manager and playwright in London. In 1740 he was called to the Bar; as a justice of the peace for Westminster from 1748 and for Middlesex from 1749, he worked hard to reduce crime in London. His Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) remains a valuable social document of the period. He also engaged actively in politics, producing three volumes of political journalism: The True Patriot (1745), The Jacobite’s Journal (1747), and The Covent Garden Journal (1752).

Of his 25 plays written in many different forms, the most popular was the burlesque Tom Thumb (1730; revised as The Tragedy of Tragedies, 1731). His sharp and witty attacks on the Whig prime minister Robert Walpole and his government in Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register (1737) established Fielding as one of the leading dramatic satirists of his day. They also led effectively to the end of Fielding’s drama career, with the latter play said to be the cause for Walpole’s stringent Licensing Act of 1737, which required all plays to be submitted for censorship by the Lord Chamberlain.

With drama no longer an option, Fielding turned to fiction, at first also in the satiric vein. His brief but highly successful Apology for the life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) is a witty attack on the enormously popular Samuel Richardson novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Richardson offers a servant-girl heroine who, by retaining her (sexual) virtue, eventually marries the wealthy but initially dissolute Mr B. In contrast, Fielding attacks what he sees as Pamela’s mercenary and hypocritical conduct by writing letters which purport to be the true views of the sexually dissolute and scheming Shamela. Fielding returned to the theme in his first major novel, The History and Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr Abraham Adams (1742), in which he presents the reader with a genuinely if naively virtuous brother for Pamela and his adventures along the road. The parody is soon left behind, however, as Fielding provides a more positive moral stance in the interchange between the adventures of the quixotic Parson Adams and his own narrative interjections. It is here too that Fielding begins to work out his own novelistic practice in a series of important opening chapters to each volume of the work. Miscellanies (3 vols., 1743) contains not only essays, plays, poems, and his little-known satire, A Journey from this World to the Next, but also The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, a work in which Fielding returns to his attacks on Walpole. As in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay, Fielding stresses the similarities between a life in politics and a life of crime, where “greatness” is a morally dubious virtue.

Fielding’s major achievement is the enormously influential The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), recognized by critics as one of the great English novels. In Tom Jones, Fielding offers us not individuals, in the manner of much 19th-century fiction, but human types, characters, and behaviour to be found through all periods of human history. This complex and intricately balanced tale was judged by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to be one of the three most perfect plots ever. Tom, a foundling, is taken in by the enlightened and benevolent Squire Allworthy, falls in love with Sophie, daughter of the bluff Tory Squire Western, is cast out through the machinations of Allworthy’s nephew Blifil, undergoes a series of rumbustious and sexual adventures along the road, but finally is united with Sophie, discovers himself to be the son of Allworthy’s sister, and learns to temper his natural exuberance and generosity with a degree of prudence. Fielding was highly influenced by Don Quixote by the 16th century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, but also lays claim to a new form of English writing, the comic-epic in prose, and with it a moral seriousness and legitimacy for the novel. For all the good-humoured action, he invites his reader to engage seriously in “exercise of judgment and penetration”. In this respect, Fielding participates in a much broader movement within English culture of the 18th century. His emphasis on conversation marks the increasing significance of a “public sphere” which values the individual in terms of the ability to engage in rational debate which will in turn lead to enlightened understanding.

His last novel, Amelia (1751), was the author’s own favourite; despite its theme of married love, it is the darkest of his fictions, concerned as it is with justice, the English penal system, and human suffering. Illness forced Fielding to relinquish his post as a magistrate in 1753, but he had achieved a reputation for honesty and fearlessness in fighting crime in the City of London. His journey to Portugal in 1754, where he travelled for reasons of health, is the subject of Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). Published posthumously, it is a touching chronicle of family life. Fielding is highly regarded for his innovations in the development of the novel. Although he was not the first novelist, he was the first major writer to break away from the epistolary method. Not only was he of great influence in the 18th century, but by devising a new theory and structure he laid the foundations for the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Victorian domestic novelists. He died in Lisbon on October 9, 1754, and is buried in the English cemetery there.