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Fiction

Notes Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement,
having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London’s first police force,
the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also
became a successful writer.

1.1.1 Biography of Henry Fielding

Fielding was educated at Eton College, where he established a lifelong friendship with William
Pitt the Elder. 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 travelled
to Leiden to study classics and law at the University. However, due to lack of money he was
obliged to return to London and he began writing for the theatre, some of his work being
savagely critical of the contemporary government under Sir Robert Walpole.
The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is alleged to be a direct response to his activities. The
particular play that triggered the Licensing Act was The Golden Rump, but Fielding’s satires
had set the tone. Once 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 theatre and resumed his career in law and, in order to support his wife
Charlotte Cradock and two children, he became a barrister.

Notes His lack of money sense meant that he and his family often endured periods of
poverty, but he was helped by Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor who later formed
the basis of Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones. After Fielding’s death, Allen provided
for the education and support of his children.

Fielding never stopped writing political satire and satires of current arts and letters. His
Tragedy of Tragedies of Tom Thumb (for which Hogarth designed the frontispiece) 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”. During the late 1730s and early 1740s Fielding continued to air his liberal and anti-
Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers. Almost by accident, in anger at the success
of Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding took to writing novels in 1741 and his first major success was
Shamela, an anonymous parody of Samuel Richardson’s melodramatic novel. 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

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