Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding

Pseudonym(s):	(some published anonymously)
Born:	April 22, 1707 Sharpham, Glastonbury, England
Died:	October 8, 1754 Lisbon
Occupation(s):	Justice of the peace, novelist, dramatist
Nationality:	England
Writing period:	1728-1754
Literary genre:	satire, picaresque
Literary movement:	Enlightenment, Augustan Age

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

Biography

Born at Sharpham near Glastonbury in Somerset in 1707, Fielding was educated at Eton College. His younger sister, Sarah, was also destined to be a successful writer. Both were shaken in 1718 when their mother died. Their maternal grandmother was given custody of them after she accused their father of being an unfit parent. 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 traveled to Leiden to study. On his return, he began writing for the theater; some of his work was savagely critical of the contemporary Whig government under Sir Robert Walpole. The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is alleged to be a direct result of his activities. The particular play that triggered the Licensing Act was The Vision of the Golden Rump, but Fielding's satires had set the tone. When 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 theater and resumed his career in law, becoming a Justice of the Peace in 1748 for Middlesex and Westminster after passing his bar exam in only three years.

Fielding never stopped writing political satire and satires of current arts and letters. His Tragedy of Tragedies of Tom Thumb 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". As Justice of the Peace he issued a warrant for the arrest of Colley Cibber for "murder of the English language".

Fielding's first major success in a novel was An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel, Pamela. 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. 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 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), a meticulously constructed picaresque novel telling the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune.

His first wife, Charlotte, on whom he later modeled the heroines of both Tom Jones and Amelia, died in 1744. Three years later Fielding married her former maid, Mary, disregarding public opinion. Despite this, he became 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. In 1751 he was presiding judge in the trial of notorious criminal James Field, finding him guilty in a robbery and sentencing him to hang. However, his health had deteriorated to such an extent that he went abroad in 1753 in search of a cure. He died in Lisbon in 1754 where his tomb at the English Church may be visited. 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 recognize criminals by their voice alone.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on February 28, 1749, Tom Jones is arguably one of the first prose works describable as a novel. The novel is divided into 18 smaller books.

Plot introduction

Tom Jones is a foundling discovered on the property of a very kind, wealthy landowner, Squire Allworthy, in Somerset in England's West Country. Tom grows into a vigorous and lusty, yet honest and kind-hearted, youth. He develops affection for his neighbor's daughter, Sophia Western. On one hand, their love reflects the romantic comedy genre popular in 18th-century Britain. However, Tom's status as a bastard causes Sophia's father and Allworthy to oppose their love; this criticism of class friction in society acted as a biting social commentary. The inclusion of prostitution and sexual promiscuity in the plot was also original for its time, and also acted as the foundation for criticism of the book's "lowness." The novel's events occupy eighteen books.

Literary analysis

As Doreen Roberts of Rutherford College, the University of Kent notes in the Introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Tom Jones:

“

In his third and greatest novel, which was published in 1749, Fielding made a crucial contribution to the development of the novel as a unified narrative structure held together by a coherent authorial vision, and ordered by a consistent and intelligible system of values to which the characters and the actions could be referred.

”

Like his contemporary, Smollett, Fielding draws on a variety of literary sources. The narrative situation comes from picaresque. The narrative situation of a dispossessed young man's (Tom's) peregrinations around the country, accompanied by a faithful servant (Partridge) who acts as character-foil to him - is a feature of picaresque, as is the 'low life' material and the introduction of secondary figures who display their natures in some kind of interaction with the hero and then disappear again.

The French and English medieval and Elizabethan romance, although Fielding didn't think much of it, is also used in Tom Jones. According to Doreen Roberts, it often used the idea of a journey, but also turned on a love-plot dominated by aristocratic and idealised characters (e.g. The Faerie Queene, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), typically involving a conflict between passion and some loftily conceived duty. Fielding also turned to comic drama to supply the model for certain localized plot-transactions, especially the Upton episode and the dénouement events in London.

Fielding also mixes some more obviously Augustan elements into this pot-pourri of literary influences - for example mock-epic elements such as various descriptions of morning or evening, several long-tailed similes, and the fisticuffs scene between Molly Seagrim and the villagers in the Somerset churchyard (c.f. Book IV, Chapter viii).

Structural coherence of the plot is as important as rhetorical according to Doreen Robers, and Fielding uses various means to achieve this. First, and most obviously, he exploits the birth-mystery of Tom to counteract the effect of episodicity. Secondly, he uses as many characters as possible in more than one role (e.g. Mr Anderson, the highwayman whom Tom helps, is Mrs Miller's cousin, who is also a trusted agent of Mr Allworthy and is thus in a position to redeem his character. However, the main unity-promoting device is the use nearly of all the secondary chacters to advance an ethos and illustrate a scheme of moral taxonomy. Fielding's moral vision operates for example between the moral poralities of appearance and reality, action (what one sees) and motive (what one deduces), reasoned principle and instinct, prudence and impulsiveness, and suspicion and trust.

Fielding also takes the opportunity at the beginning of each book to discourse on some general moral or social issue, and then proceeds to a narrative situation in which the issue is concretised, or he refers his reader back by implication to some past action to which it is pertinent. The Man of the Hill episode, for example, illustrates that habitual suspiciousness and unforgivingness can sometimes be a position arrived at as a result of bitter experience, but in Book XI, Fielding points out that it almost 'always proceeds from a bad heart' (Chapter x, p. 432).

Doreen Roberts concludes that:

“

Few novels, indeed, have aroused such stark and abiding evaluative disagreements as 'Tom Jones'. From the first, what some readers hailed as a refreshingly broad-spirited tolerance was denounced by others, like Richardson, as moral coarseness and special pleading. Coleridge's admiration for the book's plot (shared by Smollett and Thackeray) as one of the three most perfect in literature ... was the reverse of Dr Johnson's or Frank Kermode's dismissal of it as clockwork. The chatty asides and prefatory discourses which charmed Empson were so disliked by Somerset Maugham that his own edition of 'Tom Jones' simply left the latter out. The omnipresent controlling narrator who fascinated Gide with his artiness and warmed Battestin with his genial wisdom struck Ford Maddox Ford as boringly and clumsily intrusive.

”

[this reviewer happens to agree with Somerset Maugham and Ford Maddox Ford on this issue!].

Partial list of works

• 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
• 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 (Joseph Andrews) - novel, 1742
• The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great - novel, 1743, ironic treatment of Jonathan Wild, the most notorious underworld figure of the time.
• 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 - 1752
• Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon - travel narrative, 1755
• Tom Thumb N.D.

External links

• Works by Henry Fielding. Project Gutenberg
• Works by Henry Fielding in e-book

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews with Shamela and Related Writings. United States of America: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987. ISBN 039302449
• Rogers, Pat, Henry Fielding, a Biography. New York: Scribner, 1979. ISBN 0684162644

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