Who is henry fielding

After his career writing satires for the stage was curtailed by the Licensing Act, Fielding resumed his work as a barrister and magistrate, and, with his younger half-brother John Fielding, he established the Bow Street Runners as a way of keeping order in London.

Censor of Great Britain. Henry Fielding wrote his first novel because he was disgusted by a novel written by Samuel Richardson. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address. Interesting Literature is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon. Cross and Dudden probably could not and certainly would not have addressed this biographical problem; Battestin faces it squarely, without either prurience or evasion. His evidence is entirely circumstantial and boils down to two considerations.

The first is opportunity: all those sisters and their one big brother together in a large, isolated country house. The second is thematic reflection, that is, the fact that the theme of incest recurs with such surprising insistency in the works both of Henry and his sister Sarah Fielding—and rarely anywhere else in the fiction of the time.

The very curious interpolated episode in Amelia , for example, in which Booth tells of the visit to his dying favorite sister; what is it doing there?

Edmund Fielding, as Battestin portrays him, was feckless and improvident but basically a kindly man, who arranged for his eldest son to go to the best school in England, Eton, and supported him generously there.

There is of course something to this version of events or it would not have lasted as long as it has, but the important point that Battestin makes as Robert D.

Fielding took chances in his dramatic practice that we are only now beginning to appreciate fully, and he was successful at it, very successful. Battestin documents these activities in fascinating detail and concludes, as does Hume, that Fielding was the dominant force in the theatre of his time and made more money as a playwright than any other dramatic author of 18th-century Britain.

After the Licensing Act forced him out of the theatre, he turned to the law in order to support himself and his family. Readers who are lawyers will be especially interested in the ordeal Fielding went through at the Middle Temple on his way to qualifying for the Bar. Fielding had need of his intellectual energy because father Edmund died in , having married for a fourth time. He was by then a lieutenant general—and a bankrupt. He was on his own. The astonishing range of his intellectual talents was fully demonstrated during the next ten years, when he published not only the series of novels beginning with Shamela and culminating in Tom Jones but also his Miscellanies in three volumes, two more plays, and political papers and pamphlets almost beyond numbering.

A suit for custody was brought by his grandmother against his charming but irresponsible father, Lt. 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. The following month he entered the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he studied classical literature. He returned to London in 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 In he married Charlotte Cradock, who was the prototype of his heroines Sophia and Amelia.

Two political satires, Pasquin and The Historical Register for the Year , 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 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 , the first of four journals that he edited in his lifetime. In 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 , in which the virtuous heroine is hilariously exposed as a conniving wench. Abraham Adams 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.

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.