Selected products from Henry Fielding

  

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, in Somerset on April 22nd 1707.  His early years were spent on his parents’ farm in Dorset. His family were well to do.  His father was a colonel, later a general in the army, his maternal grandfather was a judge of the Queen’s Bench and his second cousin would later become the fourth Earl of Denbigh. 

He was educated at Eton where he became lifelong friends with William Pitt the Elder. 

An early romance ended disastrously and with it his removal to London and the beginnings of a glittering literary career.  Early advice on this came from another cousin, the noted poet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  Fielding published his first play, at age 21, in 1728. 

Later that same year he journeyed to the University at Leiden, the oldest University in Holland, to study classics and law.  However, within months, with funds low, mainly due to his father cutting off his allowance, he was forced to return to London and to write for the theatre. 

It was a twist of fate that was to ensure him both notoriety and a reputation that would exceed his wildest expectations. 

He was prolific, sometimes writing six plays a year, but he did like to poke fun at the authorities. His plays were thought to be the final straw for the authorities in their attempts to bring some sense of order to an increasingly provocative Theatre. Some of the plays denigrated, insulted, or criticised either the King, or his Government, in ways that caused them to react with their preferred response; a new law.  Although the Golden Rump was cited as the play on which the authorities based their need for better regulation it is thought that the constant stepping over the line by Fielding in his own works was the actual trigger for, and target of, the new law.  No copy of the play, The Golden Rump, exists today and it seems never, in fact, to have been performed or perhaps even published. Various accounts attribute Fielding as the author and others say it was secretly commissioned by Walpole himself to bring about the conditions necessary to bring the Act before Parliament. 

Whatever the validity in 1737 The Theatrical Licensing Act was passed.  At a stroke political satire was almost impossible. Fielding much admired – and reviled – for his savaging of Sir Robert Walpole government was rendered mute.  Any playwright who was viewed with suspicion by the Government now found an audience difficult to find and therefore Theatre owners now toed the Government line, works only being available for performance after review by the Lord Chamberlain.  A process that was to last in England, although greatly amended in 1843, until 1968. 

Fielding was practical in the circumstances and ironically stopped writing to once again take up his career in the practice of law. He became a barrister after studying at Middle Temple – he completed the six year course in only three.  By this time he had also married Charlotte Craddock, his first wife, and they would go on to have five children, but only a daughter would survive. Charlotte died in 1744 but was immortalised as the heroine in both Tom Jones and Amelia.  

As a businessman Fielding lacked any financial education and he and his family often endured bouts of poverty.  He did however find a wealthy benefactor in the shape of Ralph Allen, who was to later feature in the novel Tom Jones as the character foundation for Squire Allworthy. 

Fielding never stopped writing political satire or satires of current arts and letters. The Tragedy of Tragedies, for which Hogarth designed the frontispiece, had, for example, some success as a printed play. He also contributed a number of works to journals of the day as well as writing for Tory periodicals, usually under the name of "Captain Hercules Vinegar".  His choice of name reveals his style. But then again his other later nom de plumes are also revealing; Sir Alexander Drawcansir and Scriblerus Secundus. 

In 1731 Fielding wrote "The Roast Beef of Old England", which is used by the Royal Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was later arranged by Richard Leveridge. 

During the late 1730s and early 1740s Fielding continued to air his liberal and anti-Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers. He was nothing if not passionate and this adherence to principles would eventually have great reward for him.   

Fielding was much put out by the success of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.  His reaction was to spur him into writing a novel.  In 1741 this first novel, Shamela, was a success, an anonymous parody of Richardson's melodramatic novel. It is a satire that follows the model of the famous Tory satirists of the previous generation; Swift and Gay. 

On the tail of this success came Joseph Andrews in 1742.  Begun as a parody on Pamela's brother, Joseph, it swiftly developed and matured into an accomplished novel in its own right and marked the entrance of Fielding as a major English novelist. 

In 1743, he published a novel in the Miscellanies volume III (which was, in fact, the first volume of the Miscellanies). This was The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. Sometimes this is cited as his first novel, as he did indeed begin writing it before Shamela, but it is now placed later.   Once again Fielding returns to satire and one of his favourite subjects – Sir Robert Walpole.  In it he draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, the infamous gang leader and highwayman. He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament to a gang of thieves, whose leader, Walpole, lives only for his desire and ambition to be a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) and should culminate only in the antithesis of greatness: being hung from a gallows. By now Walpole had resigned as Prime minster after some 20 years.  Fielding could now re-affirm political allegiance back to the Whigs and would now denounce both Tories and Jacobites in his writings. 

Although Fielding was never afraid to court controversy he published his next work anonymously in 1746, and perhaps with good reason.  The Female Husband, a fictionalized account of a sensational case of a female transvestite who was tried for duping another woman into marriage.  This was one of a number of small published pamphlets at sixpence a time. Though a minor item in both length and his canon it shows Fielding’s consistent interest and examination of fraud, sham, and masks but, of course, his subject matter was rather sensational. 

In 1747, three years after Charlotte's death and ignoring public opinion, he married her former maid, Mary Daniel, who was pregnant. Mary bore him five children altogether; three daughters, who died early and sons William and Allen. 

Undoubtedly the masterpiece of Fielding’s career was the novel Tom Jones, published in 1749.  It is a wonderfully and carefully constructed picaresque novel following the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune. 

Fielding was a consistent anti-Jacobite and a keen supporter of the Church of England. This led to him now being richly rewarded with the position of London's Chief Magistrate.  The position itself had no salary attached but he refused all manner of bribes during his tenure, which was most unusual. Fielding continued to write and his career both literary and professional continued to climb.   

In 1749 he joined with his younger half-brother John, to help found what was the nascent forerunner to a London police force, the Bow Street Runners. (He and his siblings were quite some partnership. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a well known novelist). 

His influence here was undoubted. He and John did much to help the cause of judicial reform and to help improve prison conditions. His pamphlets and enquiries included a proposal for the abolition of public hangings. This was not, as you would think because he was opposed to capital punishment as such—indeed, for example, in his 1751 presiding over the trial of the notorious criminal James Field, he found him guilty in a robbery and sentenced him to hang. 

In January 1752 Fielding started a fortnightly periodical titled The Covent-Garden Journal, which he would publish under the colourful pseudonym of "Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain" until November of the same year. In this periodical, Fielding directly challenged the "armies of Grub Street" and the other periodical writers of the day in a conflict that would eventually become the Paper War of 1752–3. 

Fielding then published, in 1753, "Examples of the interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, a work in which, rejecting the deistic and materialistic visions of the world, he wrote in favour of the belief in God's presence and divine judgement, arguing that the rise of murder rates was due to neglect of the Christian religion. In 1753 he would add to this with Proposals for making an effectual Provision for the Poor. 

Fielding's ardent commitment to the cause of justice as a great humanitarian in the 1750s unfortunately coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health.  Such was his decline that in the summer of 1754 he travelled, with Mary and his daughter, to Portugal in search of a cure.  Gout, asthma, dropsy and other afflictions forced him to use crutches.  His health continued to fail alarmingly. 

Henry Fielding died in Lisbon two months later on October 8^th, 1754.

His tomb is in the city's English Cemetery (Cemitério Inglês), which is now the graveyard of St. George's Church, Lisbon.