Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English writer and judge known for the use of humour and satire in his works. His famous novels include Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and Amelia (1751). Along with Samuel Richardson, Fielding is seen as the founder of the traditional English novel. As well as being a novelist, Fielding was also a playwright, known for his satirical comedies The Author's Farce (1730), Tom Thumb (1730), The Letter Writers (1731) and The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.
Henry Fielding was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, the seat of his mother's family in Sharpham, Somerset. He was the son of Lt.-Gen. Edmund Fielding and Sarah Gould, daughter of Sir Henry Gould. A scion of the Earl of Denbigh, his father was nephew of William Fielding, 3rd Earl of Denbigh.
Educated at Eton College, Fielding began a lifelong friendship with William Pitt the Elder. His mother died when he was 11. 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, but he continued to see his father in London.
In 1725, Henry tried to abduct his cousin Sarah Andrews, with whom he was infatuated, while she was on her way to church. He fled to avoid prosecution.
In 1728, Fielding travelled to Leiden to study classics and law at the university. Penury forced him back to London, where he began writing for the theatre. Some of his work savagely criticised the government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole.
Returning from his studies at Leiden late in 1729, Fielding “came up to London … thrown upon his own resources” and determined to earn his living by the pen. Early the next year he enlisted fellow writer James Ralph to provide the prologue for his comedy The Temple Beau (licensed January 1730). Ralph’s recently published miscellany The Touch-Stone; or, The Taste of the Town (1728; re-issued 1731) urged dramatists to abandon imported opera and classical heroes in favour of “home-bred” stories, mocked the vogue for “merry Tragedies,” and celebrated the satirical possibilities of puppet shows and fair-ground spectacle.
Fielding’s response was almost instantaneous. The Author’s Farce; or, The Pleasures of the Town opened at the Haymarket on 30 March 1730 with a concluding puppet-show whose dramatis personae—Don Tragedio, Signior Opera, Monsieur Pantomime, Mrs Novel, Punch and Jack Pudding—mirror the catalogue in Ralph’s treatise. Its dialogue repeats Ralph’s gibes at Bartholomew and Southwark fairs and even alludes to the recent “rabbit-woman” hoax of 1726. Barely a month later, on 24 April 1730, Fielding produced the two-act afterpiece Tom Thumb (expanded in 1731 as The Tragedy of Tragedies). Echoing Ralph’s programme, the preface hails “home-bred Subjects,” the prologue ridicules tragedies that aim chiefly to raise laughter, and the play itself casts a diminutive hero amid outsized props while repeating the comic story of the protagonist “dropp’d in a pudding.” These two farces mark Fielding’s decisive pivot from polite comedy to the satirical burlesque that would dominate his dramatic output throughout the 1730s and shape the ironic voice of his later novels.
According to George R. Levine, Henry Fielding, in his first writings used two forms of "rhetorical poses" that were popular during the eighteenth century. Henry Fielding would construct "the non-ironic pseudonym such as Addison and Steele used in the Spectator, and the ironic mask or Persona, such as Swift used in A Modest Proposal." The Theatrical Licensing Act 1737 is said to be a direct response to his activities in writing for the theatre. Although the play that triggered the act was the unproduced, anonymously authored The Golden Rump, Fielding's dramatic satires had set the tone. Once it was passed, political satire on stage became all but impossible. Fielding retired from the theatre and resumed his legal career to support his wife Charlotte Craddock and two children by becoming a barrister, joining the Middle Temple in 1737 and being called to the bar there in 1740.
Fielding's lack of financial acumen meant the family often endured periods of poverty, but they were helped by Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor, on whom Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones would be based. Allen went on to provide for the education and support of Fielding's children after the writer's death.
Fielding never stopped writing political satire and satires of current arts and letters. Issued in 1731, the printed play The Tragedy of Tragedies—for which William Hogarth supplied a celebrated frontispiece—proved especially popular. Published under the pseudonym “H. Scriblerus Secundus”, a pseudonym intended to link himself ideally with the Scriblerus Club of literary satirists founded by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. He also contributed several works to journals.
From 1734 to 1739, Fielding wrote anonymously for the leading Tory periodical, The Craftsman, against the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. His patron was the opposition Whig MP George Lyttelton, a boyhood friend from Eton to whom he later dedicated Tom Jones. Lyttelton followed his leader Lord Cobham in forming a Whig opposition to Walpole's government called the Cobhamites, which included another of Fielding's Eton friends, William Pitt. In The Craftsman, Fielding voiced an opposition attack on bribery and corruption in British politics. Despite writing for the opposition to Walpole, which included Tories as well as Whigs, Fielding was "unshakably a Whig" and often praised Whig heroes such as the Duke of Marlborough and Gilbert Burnet.
Fielding dedicated his play Don Quixote in England to the opposition Whig leader Lord Chesterfield. It appeared on 17 April 1734, the same day writs were issued for the general election. He dedicated his 1735 play The Universal Gallant to Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, a political follower of Chesterfield. The other prominent opposition paper, Common Sense, founded by Chesterfield and Lyttelton, was named after a character in Fielding's Pasquin (1736). Fielding wrote at least two articles for it in 1737 and 1738.
Fielding continued to air political views in satirical journalism in the late 1730s and early 1740s. He co-founded and initially edited the thrice-weekly The Champion; or, British Mercury (launched 15 November 1739), writing under the persona “Captain Hercules Vinegar”; from April 1740 it appeared as Champion; or, Evening Advertiser. Fielding remained principal editor until June 1741, when James Ralph succeeded him; the paper continued until 31 August 1742.
After stepping down from the paper, Fielding turned to prose fiction. In response to the popularity of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, he issued the anonymous parody Shamela, his first success in the new form.
Fielding followed this with Joseph Andrews (1742), an original work supposedly dealing with Pamela's brother, Joseph. His purpose was more than parody, for as stated in the preface, he intended a "kind of writing which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language." In what Fielding called a "comic epic poem in prouse", he 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 the novels to come was use of everyday reality of character and action, as opposed to the fables of the past. While begun as a parody, it developed into an accomplished novel in its own right and is seen as 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: The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great, which is sometimes counted as his first, as he almost certainly began it before he wrote Shamela and Joseph Andrews. It is a satire of Walpole equating him and Jonathan Wild, the gang leader and highwayman. He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament with a gang of thieves run by Walpole, whose constant desire to be a "Great Man", a common epithet with Walpole, ought to culminate in the antithesis of greatness: hanging.