Henry Fielding

1707-1754. One of the major 18th-century British playwrights and an important novelist.

Life

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park near Glastonbury, Somerset, the estate of his grandfather Sir Henry Gould, one of the most distinguished lawyers of the time, on 22 April 1707. His father was Edmund Fielding, a successful army officer, his mother Sarah was the daughter of Sir Henry. After Henry, his parents had six more children, five of them girls, over the following nine years.

In 1710, the family moved to a farm in the village of East Stour, Dorset, where the children spent most of the time with their mother, father Edmund being frequently away on active service or pleasure trips. Henry's mother died in 1718, and his father found a new wife within less than a year, who was already pregnant when the two of them returned to East Stour. From this moment on, life changed profoundly for Henry and his siblings. They were neglected, if not even abused, by Edmund and his new wife, which caused Henry's grandmother, the widow of Sir Henry Gould, to sue her son-in-law for the income of the farm as well as the custody of the children. After two years of court procedures, Lady Gould won the case and took the children to her new home in Salisbury. Henry, however, only visited his grandmother during his school holidays, because he had been sent to Eton in 1719.

Henry's time at Eton ended in 1724. Although he had made some upper class friends there, his decision what to do for a living was not what one might have expected. The obvious thing would have been to start a career either in the army, as his father and paternal uncle, or as a lawyer, a profession common in his mother's branch of the family. Instead, Henry chose to become a writer.

His first known attempt on literature was a pamphlet containing two poems, published in 1727, but he soon turned towards drama - and successfully so. His first play, Love in Several Masks, was performed in Drury Lane in 1728, directed by Colley Cibber, at that time the most important figure in London theatre. The play was performed only four times, which made it not much of a success, but at least brought Henry some money (the playwright got the profits from the third performance) and the script was published.

Instead of trying to advance his career in London after this promising start, Fielding went abroad to study the classics at the university of Leyden the same year. In 1729, however, he already abandoned his studies and returned to England after being charged with failing to pay his debts to several creditors. He brought with him the drafts for new plays and, although he soon fell out with Cibber, became the most successful British dramatist for the years to follow. In 1734, Fielding married Charlotte Cradock. She brought a considerable dowry and an inheritance from her mother a year later, and Henry earned well enough with his plays, but still he managed to spend even more money than came in.

What is more, in 1737 Fielding's career as a playwright was ended by the Stage Licensing Act. In many of his comedies, he had more or less explicitly satirized and ridiculed Robert Walpole and his government. The Act required all plays to be approved of by the Lord Chamberlain before being performed and is sometimes regarded as a direct response to and personal attack on Fielding himself. Deprived of his income and financially burdened, Fielding then, at the age of thirty, decided to train as a lawyer and qualified in 1740. For the next eight years, he travelled across the country in search of work. In 1744, Charlotte died, and in 1747, Fielding married her maid Mary Daniel, who was already pregnant at the time of the wedding. Meanwhile, he started experimenting with prose fiction.

The year 1748 finally brought relief to Fielding's inconvenient condition, when George Lyttleton, an old friend from Eton, helped him to the positions of Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex. Both were known as quite lucrative in terms of bribes, but Fielding apparently refused to accept any and rather went about doing proper police work, if not always without errors and criticism. Besides, he published The Covent-Garden Journal periodically in 1752.

Fielding's health, which had been poor for years, suffered severely from the strains of his job as Justice of the Peace, and in 1753, he was hardly able to work anymore. After an extraordinarily hard winter, he left England for the milder climate of Lisbon, where he died on 14 October 1754.

Works

Henry Fielding's works were often very satirical and humoristic, influenced by writers like Molière, Cervantes and Jonathan Swift. He even signed some of his early works with "Scriblerus Secundus" in reference to the Scriblerus Club of Swift and Alexander Pope. Episodes form the Bible and the Classics also played an important part, especially in terms of plot. Fielding's first novel, Shamela, was written as a reply to Samuel Richardson's Pamela.

1728 Love in Several Masques (play)

1730 The Temple Beau (play)

1730 The Author's Farce (play)

1731 The Tragedy of Tragedies (play)

1731 The Grub-Street Opera (play)

1732 The Modern Husband (play)

1732 The Covent-Garden Tragedy (play)

1733 The Miser (play; adapted from Molière)

1734 Don Quixote in England (play)

1736 Pasquin (play)

1737 Eurydice (play)

1737 The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (play)

1737 Eurydice Hiss'd (play)

1741 Shamela (novel)

1742 Joseph Andrews (novel)

1743 Miscellanies (mixed works; 3 vols.)

1749 Tom Jones (novel)

1751 Amelia (novel)

1753 A proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (pamphlet)

1755 The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (published posthumously)

Sources

Battestin, Martin C./Battestin, Ruthe R. Henry Fielding. A Life. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Rawson, Claude (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Uglow, Jenny. Henry Fielding. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1995.