Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding

Pseudonym(s):	Captain Hercules Vinegar (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 one young woman, Sarah Andrew, 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. Notably Tom Thumb (1730), The Coffee House Politician (1730), The Letter Writers (1731), and The Covent Garden Tragedy ((1732). He also translated Molière's The Mock Doctor (1732) and The Miser (1733). Fielding staged Don Quixote in England in 1734 before marrying Charlotte Cradock—a woman from Salisbury whom he had been courting for some time—on November 28, 1734.

The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is alleged to be a direct result of Fielding's activities. The particular play that triggered the Licensing Act was The Vision of the Golden Rump, which Walpole read aloud during proceedings to argue the point that the government should regulate theater performances. Although it is unknown who penned The Vision of the Golden Rump—and theories exist that the play was engineered for the purpose of inciting the Licensing Act of 1737— Fielding's works are considered to be the main offenders, particularly because several of them personally targeted Walpole. 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, an English playwright/actor/manager, for the "murder of the English language".

His anonymously-published pamphlet 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 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, whom he became close to during their mutual grieving for the late Charlotte. Despite negative public opinion of Fielding's second marriage, he became London's Chief Magistrate and his literary career continued to grow stronger. 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 shortly after his arrival in Lisbon, Portugal in 1754, where his tomb at the English Church may be visited. His final work was published posthumously in 1755: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Despite being 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.

Novels

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews

Fielding's first major success in a novel was An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson's melodramatic novel, Pamela, which was exceedingly popular at the time, particularly for its strong moral message. Shamela was a satire that follows the model of the famous Tory satirists of the previous generation (Jonathan Swift and John Gay, in particular).

Richardson's Pamela concerns the steadfast virtue of a young woman, Pamela, who has been been employed by the lecherous Mr. B-----, who has been making sexual advances at her, out of wedlock, leading to her practical imprisonment in his home. Both Pamela and Shamela are epistles composed of letters that the titular woman sends home to her mother. In Pamela, the heroine eventually convinces her near-rapist to marry her so that she can maintain her "virtue" and they can live a happily married couple. Fielding satirized that Pamela was a consistent typo, and that the true protagonist, Shamela, wasn't insisting upon living a devoted religious life out of a desire to uphold high moral standards, but rather because she was having an affair for the parson, Williams. In the end, however, she still marries Mr. Booby (as Fielding named the anonymous "Mr. B-----") whom, it is noted, is rather wealthy.

Joseph Andrews

Fielding followed "Shamela" 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.

Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great

In 1743, Fielding 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.

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, and Fielding's most accomplished work—or certainly most epic. The novel is divided into 18 smaller books. It was published on 28 February 1749 and enjoyed immediate popularity despite intense criticism for its "lowness."

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."

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 idealized 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 denouement 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 the novel's episodic nature. 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 characters to advance an ethos and illustrate a scheme of moral taxonomy. Fielding's moral vision operates between the moral polarities 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 demonstrated, or he refers his reader back by implication to some past action to which it is pertinent.

Amelia

Perhaps due to Fielding's strenuous service as a justice and declining health, his 1752 novel, Amelia took on a more deliberate moral authority and was met with apathy. It's titular character, Amelia, was modeled after his late first wife, Charlotte, and her character is considered the one redeeming value of this particular novel. Having such a morally sound protagonist caused Fielding to stray slightly away from his traditional picaresque form. Rather, the uncouth-yet-likable character is found in Amelia's husband, William Booth. Their domestic quarrels are the subject of the novel. Fielding died in Lisbon, Portugal two years after its publication.

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
• Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1992. ISBN 1853260215
• Rogers, Pat, Henry Fielding, a Biography. New York: Scribner, 1979. ISBN 0684162644

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