Henry Fielding

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The English author and magistrate Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was one of the great novelists of the 18th century. His fiction, plays, essays, and legal pamphlets show he was a humane and witty man, with a passion for reform and justice.

The English novel of today was largely created by Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. Richardson's works, written in the form of a series of letters, are experiments in psychological analysis. Fielding's novels, in which the author himself tells the story and controls the plot structure, are considered the first accurate portrayal of contemporary manners.

Henry Fielding was born on April 22, 1707, at Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, the estate of his maternal grandfather. In 1710 the Fieldings moved to East Stour, Dorsetshire. When Henry was 11, his mother died. A suit for custody was brought by his grandmother against his charming but irresponsible father, Lt. Gen. Edmund Fielding. The settlement placed Henry in his grandmother's care, although he continued to visit his father in London. Henry was educated at Eton. At 17 he attempted to elope with a young heiress but was frustrated by her guardian.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fielding's cousin, described him about this time as a high-spirited youth, full of the joy of life, witty and humorous. He was handsome and more than 6 feet in height.

Career as a Playwright

Fielding's first play, Love in Several Masques, was presented in London in February 1728. The following month he entered the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he studied classical literature. He returned to London in 1730. For the next 7 years Fielding was active as a playwright and theater manager. He wrote masques, farces, comedies, and burlesques, including the famous burlesque Tom Thumb (1730). In 1734 he married Charlotte Cradock, who was the prototype of his heroines Sophia and Amelia. Two political satires, Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737), so infuriated the Whig government of Robert Walpole that all London theaters, except two protected by royal patent, were ordered closed by the Licensing Act of 1737. Fielding's career as a playwright was at an end.

Fielding then turned to the study of the law and was admitted to the bar in less than 3 years. He continued to oppose the Walpole government by editing a political journal, The Champion (1739-1740), the first of four journals that he edited in his lifetime.

First Novels

In 1740 Richardson published a novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, the story of a young servant girl who preserves her virtue against the repeated advances of her master, Squire B - , so impressing him at last that he marries her. The book was an immediate success, being read as a lesson in morality by all young ladies. Fielding could not resist spoofing this, to him, ridiculous tale in an unsigned pamphlet, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), in which the virtuous heroine is hilariously exposed as a conniving wench.

Continuing the attack on Richardson, Fielding wrote The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742). His purpose in this book, however, was more than parody, for he intended, as he announced in the preface, a "kind of writing which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language." In this new kind of writing, which Fielding called a "comic epic poem in prose," he creatively blended two classical traditions: that of the epic, which had been poetic, and that of the drama, but emphasizing the comic rather than the tragic. Another distinction of Joseph Andrews and of the novels to come was the use of everyday reality of character and action as opposed to the fables of the past.

Joseph Andrews is supposedly the brother of "the illustrious Pamela, whose virtue is at present so famous." He resists the advances of his employer, Lady Booby, in order to remain faithful to his true love, Fanny Goodwill. After escaping Lady Booby and surviving amusing adventures along the road with his companion, Parson Adams, Joseph is reunited with Fanny.

Fielding's law practice was not prospering, and the moderate income from Joseph Andrews was not sufficient to provide for his wife and children. Consequently he gathered for publication as Miscellanies (3 vols., 1743) some earlier works, including The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild, the Great, a savagely ironic account of a notorious London thief whom he equated satirically with all "great men," Robert Walpole in particular.

Tom Jones

Fielding's eldest daughter died in 1742, his wife in 1744, and he himself was crippled with gout. The death of his beloved wife was such a shock to Fielding that his friends feared for his reason. Yet during these sad years Fielding was creating his comic masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which appeared in 1749.

The plot of Tom Jones is too ingeniously complicated for simple summary; its basis is Tom's alienation from his foster father, Squire Allworthy, and his sweetheart, Sophia Western, and his reconciliation with them after lively and dangerous adventures on the road and in London. The triumph of the book is its presentation of English life and character in the mid-18th century. Every social type is represented, and through them every shade of moral behavior. Fielding's varied style tempers the basic seriousness of the novel, and his authorial comment preceding each chapter adds a significant dimension to the conventionally straightforward narrative.

While he was writing Tom Jones, Fielding also edited two journals - The True Patriot (1745-1746) and The Jacobite's Journal (1747-1748) - which were undertaken to counteract popular enthusiasm for Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. Fielding wrote a preface (1744) for The Adventures of David Simple, a novel by his sister Sarah, and another preface (1747) for its sequel. In 1747 he married Mary Daniel, his first wife's servant; their grief over her death had drawn them together. Together they had five children.

Career as a Magistrate

In 1748 Fielding was commissioned justice of the peace for Westminster and later for Middlesex as well. Most of his work was concerned with London's criminal population of thieves, informers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In a corrupt and callous society he became noted for his impartial judgments, incorruptibility, and compassion for those whom social inequities had forced into crime. The income from his office, which he called "the dirtiest money upon earth," dwindled because he refused to take money from the very poor. Fielding was assisted in his work by his blind half brother, Sir John Fielding (1722-1780), a justice of the peace, who was said to be able to recognize over 3,000 thieves by their voices. The brothers organized the Bow Street Runners, the first modern police force, and they lobbied continually in Parliament for enlightened criminal legislation.

Henry Fielding's experiences as a magistrate gave a more serious tone to his last novel, Amelia (1752). The sufferings of the heroine, Amelia Booth, and her husband, a soldier, are used to expose and condemn the civil and military establishments of the period. In his essays for his last periodical, the Covent Garden Journal (1752), Fielding criticized wittily and incisively politics, society, and literature.

Sick with jaundice, dropsy, and gout and worn out by overwork, Fielding resigned his post as magistrate and sailed to Lisbon, where he hoped to recuperate. Even this painful voyage was matter for his pen; he made it the subject of his last work, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which was published posthumously (1755). Fielding died in Lisbon on Oct. 8, 1754, and was buried in the English cemetery there.

Further Reading

There are two major critical biographies of Fielding: Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (3 vols., 1918; repr. 1964), and Frederick H. Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (2 vols., 1952; repr. 1966). A short biography is John E. Butt, Fielding (1954). The fullest treatment of the novels is in Aurélien Digeon, The Novels of Fielding (1925). The chapters on Fielding in the following books are useful: Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, vol. 4 (1932); Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. 1 (1957); and Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957). Recommended for general historical background are Arthur S. Tuberville, English Men and Manners in the Eighteenth Century (2d ed. 1929); George M. Trevelyan, English Social History (2d ed. 1946); and Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760 (2d ed., rev. by C. H. Stuart, 1962).

Fielding, Henry (1707-54). English writer and magistrate, Educated at Eton and Leiden, Fielding wrote numerous plays, including swingeing political satires of Walpole's government, until the theatrical Licensing Act of 1737. Called to the bar in 1740, Fielding subsequently divided his time between the law and literature, in Joseph Andrews (1742) and his masterpiece, Tom Jones (1749). Appointed JP at Bow Street in 1748, Fielding was an energetic advocate of effective measures to reduce crime, corruption, and public disorder. His health undermined by overwork, Fielding travelled to Lisbon after the publication of Amelia, his final novel, and died there.

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.

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

Quotes:

"It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived."

"He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter."

"Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality."

"Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of."

"A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World!"

"Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be."

See more famous quotes by Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding
Born	22 April 1707(1707-04-22) Sharpham, Glastonbury, Somerset, England
Died	8 October 1754 (aged 47) Lisbon, Portugal
Pen name	"Captain Hercules Vinegar", also some works published anonymously
Occupation	Justice of the peace, novelist, dramatist
Nationality	English
Writing period	1728-1754
Genres	satire, picaresque
Literary movement	Enlightenment, Augustan Age
Relative(s)	Sara Banerji (1900s author)
Influenced George Orwell

Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones.

Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Literary style 3 In popular culture 4 Partial list of works 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 External links

Biography

Fielding was educated at Eton College, where he established a lifelong friendship with William Pitt the Elder.^[1] His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer.^[2] After a romantic episode with a young woman that ended in his getting into trouble with the law, he went to London where his literary career began. In 1728, he travelled to Leiden to study classics and law at the University.^[1] However, due to lack of money he was obliged to return to London and he began writing for the theatre, some of his work being savagely critical of the contemporary government under Sir Robert Walpole.

The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is alleged to be a direct result of his activities.^[1][3] The particular play that triggered the Licensing Act was The Vision of the Golden Rump, but Fielding's satires had set the tone. Once the Licensing Act passed, political satire on the stage was virtually impossible, and playwrights whose works were staged were viewed as suspect. Fielding therefore retired from the theatre and resumed his career in law and, in order to support his wife Charlotte Cradock and two children, he became a barrister.^[1][3]

His lack of money sense meant that he and his family often endured periods of poverty, but he was also helped by Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor who later formed the basis of Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones. After Fielding's death, Allen provided for the education and support of his children.

Fielding never stopped writing political satire and satires of current arts and letters. His Tragedy of Tragedies of Tom Thumb (for which Hogarth designed the frontispiece) was, for example, quite successful as a printed play. He also contributed a number of works to journals of the day. He wrote for Tory periodicals, usually under the name of "Captain Hercules Vinegar". During the late 1730s and early 1740s Fielding continued to air his liberal and anti-Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers. Almost by accident, in anger at the success of Richardson's Pamela, Fielding took to writing novels in 1741 and his first major success was Shamela, an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel. It is a satire that follows the model of the famous Tory satirists of the previous generation (Jonathan Swift and John Gay, in particular).

He followed this up with Joseph Andrews (1742), an original work supposedly dealing with Pamela's brother, Joseph.^[1] Although also begun as a parody, this work developed into an accomplished novel in its own right and is considered to mark Fielding's debut as a serious novelist. In 1743, he published a novel in the Miscellanies volume III (which was the first volume of the Miscellanies). This was The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. This novel is sometimes thought of as his first because he almost certainly began composing it before he wrote Shamela and Joseph Andrews. It is a satire of Walpole that draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, the infamous gang leader and highwayman. He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament with a gang of thieves being run by Walpole, whose constant desire to be a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) should culminate only in the antithesis of greatness: being hanged.

His anonymously-published The Female Husband of 1746 is a fictionalized account of a notorious case in which a female transvestite was tried for duping another woman into marriage. Though a minor item in Fielding's total oeuvre, the subject is consistent with his ongoing preoccupation with fraud, sham, and masks. His greatest work was Tom Jones (1749), a meticulously constructed picaresque novel telling the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune. Charlotte, on whom he later modelled the heroines of both Tom Jones and Amelia, died in 1744. Three years later Fielding – disregarding public opinion – married Charlotte's former maid, Mary, who was pregnant.^[3]

Despite this, his consistent anti-Jacobitism and support for the Church of England led to him being rewarded a year later with the position of London's Chief Magistrate, and his literary career went from strength to strength. Joined by his younger half-brother John, he helped found what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners in 1749.^[4] According to the historian G.M. Trevelyan, they were two of the best magistrates in eighteenth-century London, and did a great deal to enhance the cause of judicial reform and improve prison conditions. His influential pamphlets and enquiries included a proposal for the abolition of public hangings. This did not, however, imply opposition to capital punishment as such—as evident, for example, in his presiding in 1751 over the trial of the notorious criminal James Field, finding him guilty in a robbery and sentencing him to hang. Despite being now blind, John Fielding succeeded his older brother as Chief Magistrate and became known as the 'Blind Beak' of Bow Street for his ability to recognise criminals by their voice alone.^[5] In January 1752, Fielding started a biweekly periodical titled The Covent-Garden Journal, which he would publish under the 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 contemporary periodical writers of the day in a conflict that would eventually become the Paper War of 1752-1753.

Fielding's ardent commitment to the cause of justice as a great humanitarian in the 1750s, coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health to such an extent that he went abroad to Portugal in 1754 in search of a cure. Gout, asthma and other afflictions meant that he had to use crutches. He died in Lisbon^[3] two months later and his tomb in the city English Cemetery (a.k.a. "Os Cyprestes") may be visited, which also has the St. George's Church (Anglican church for Lisbon) inside the cemetery.

Henry Fielding circa 1743 etching from Jonathan Wild the Great

Henry Fielding gravesite which contains Anglican church of St. George nearby in the cemetery.

Entrance to the Lisbon English Cemetery where Henry Fielding's gavesite is located.

St George church is the Anglican church for Lisbon. Fielding gavesite is about 150 feet away.

Literary style

Whereas Defoe and Richardson both attempt to hide the fictional nature of their work under the guise of 'memoirs' and 'letters' respectively, Henry Fielding adopted a position which represented a new departure in terms of prose fiction—in no way do his novels constitute an effort to disguise literary devices. In fact, he was the first major novelist to openly admit that his prose fiction was pure artifice. Also, in comparison with his arch rival and contemporary, Richardson, Fielding presents his reader with a much wider range of characters taken from all social classes.

Fielding's lack of psychological realism (i.e. the feelings and emotions of his characters are rarely explored in any depth) can perhaps be put down to his overriding concern to reveal the universal order of things. It can be argued that his novel Tom Jones reflects its author's essentially neoclassical outlook—character is something the individual is blessed with at birth, a part of life's natural order or pattern. Characters within Fielding's novels also correspond largely to types; e.g. Squire Western is a typically boorish and uncultivated Tory squire, obsessed with fox hunting, drinking and acquiring more property.

So Fielding's comic epic contains a range of wonderful—but essentially static—characters whose motives and behaviour are largely predetermined. There is little emotional depth to his portrayal of them, and the complex realities of interactive human relationships that are so much a part of the modern novel are of negligible importance to him. Perhaps the character we come to know best is the figure of the omniscient narrator himself (i.e. Fielding) whose company some of his readers come to enjoy.^[5]

In popular culture

• Fielding, played by John Sessions, satirically narrates the 1997 television adaptation of his own work The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. His brother John Fielding also appears as the magistrate at Jones' trial.
• Fielding is the central character in the 2008 Channel 4 historical drama City of Vice, an account on the early cases of the Bow Street runners, which used Fielding's diaries as a source. Fielding was played by character actor Ian McDiarmid.
• Fielding is portrayed in the 2006 BBC drama by David Warner, Sweeney Todd starring Ray Winstone as Sweeney Todd and Essie Davis.

In Joe Wright's 2007 film adaptation of "Atonement" (novel by Ian Mcewan), Cecilia admits to Robbie that she "prefers Fielding anyday; he's much more passionate" as opposed to the other 18th century Romantic writers."

Partial list of works

• The Masquerade – a poem (Fielding's first publication)
• Love in Several Masques – play, 1728
• Rape upon Rape – play, 1730. Adapted by Bernard Miles as Lock Up Your Daughters! in 1959, filmed in 1974
• The Temple Beau – play, 1730
• The Author's Farce – play, 1730
• The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb – play, 1731
• Grub-Street Opera – play, 1731
• The Modern Husband – play, 1732
• The Covent Garden Tragedy – play, 1732
• Pasquin – play, 1736
• The Historical Register for the Year 1736 – play, 1737
• An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews – novel, 1741
• The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Abrams – novel, 1742
• The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great – novel, 1743, ironic treatment of Jonathan Wild, the most notorious underworld figure of the time. Published as Volume 3 of Miscellanies.
• Miscellanies – collection of works, 1743, contained the poem Part of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, Modernized in Burlesque Verse
• The Female Husband or the Surprising History of Mrs Mary alias Mr George Hamilton, who was convicted of having married a young woman of Wells and lived with her as her husband, taken from her own mouth since her confinement – pamphlet, fictionalized report, 1746
• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – novel, 1749
• A Journey from this World to the Next – 1749
• Amelia – novel, 1751
• The Covent Garden Journal – periodical, 1752
• Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon – travel narrative, 1755

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Henry Fielding". The Dorset Page. http://www.thedorsetpage.com/people/Henry_Fielding.htm. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
2. ^ "Henry Fielding (1707-1754)". The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1525. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
3. ^ ^{a b c d} "Henry Fielding (1707-1754)". Books and writers. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hfieldin.htm. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
4. ^ "Henry Fielding". Spartacus Educational. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jfielding.htm. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
5. ^ ^{a b} Words, Words, Words, From the Beginnings to the 18th Century, La Spiga languages, 2003

Bibliography

The first collected edition[1] of Fielding was Works (London, 1762); other editions are those edited respectively by Scott and Roscoe (Edinburgh, 1840), by Browne (London, 1871), by Gosse (New York, 1898), and by Saintbury (New York and London, 1902). Fielding's first biographer was Arthur Murray, whose essay on Fielding's life and genius was introduced in the first collected series. (See above). The best life is that of Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London & New York: Routledge, 1989).

• Lawrence, Life and Times of Fielding (London, 1855)
• Leslie Stephen's admirable essay on Fielding in Hours in a Library (London, 1874-79)
• Linder, Henry Fielding's Dramatische Werke (Dresden, 1895)

A survey of Fielding scholarship and criticism by H. George Hahn, "Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography" (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1979). Full and excellent critical introductions to each of Fielding's important works will be found in G. E. Saintbury's edition of the Works (ten volumes, London, 1898).

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Henry Fielding

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Henry Fielding

• Works by Henry Fielding at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Henry Fielding in e-book
• Famous Quotes by Henry Fielding
• Henry Fielding at the National Portrait Gallery

v • d • e Henry Fielding People John Fielding · Sarah Fielding · Christopher Smart · Samuel Richardson · Scriblerus Club Events Actor Rebellion of 1733 · Licensing Act 1737 · Paper War of 1752–1753 Early plays Love in Several Masques · The Temple Beau · The Author's Farce · Tom Thumb · Rape upon Rape · The Tragedy of Tragedies · The Letter Writers · The Welsh Opera · The Grub Street Opera · The Lottery · The Modern Husband · The Old Debauchees · The Covent Garden Tragedy · The Mock Doctor Later plays The Historical Register for the Year 1736 Novels and Narratives Shamela · Joseph Andrews · Jonathan Wild · Tom Jones · Amelia Essays and Misc. The Covent-Garden Journal

Persondata
NAME	Fielding, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English Justice of the peace, novelist, dramatist
DATE OF BIRTH	22 April 1707(1707-04-22)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sharpham, Glastonbury, England
DATE OF DEATH	8 October, [1754
PLACE OF DEATH	Lisbon

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