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Henry Fielding (1707-1754) |
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British writer, playwright and journalist, founder of the English Realistic school in literature with Samuel Richardson. Henry Fielding's career as a dramatist has been shadowed by his fame as a novelist, who undertook the duty of writing comic epic poems in prose – Fielding once described himself as "great, tattered bard." Thumb. When I'm not thank'd at all, I'm thank'd enough, Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, Somerset. He was by birth a gentleman, close allied to the aristocracy. His father was a nephew of the 3th Earl of Denbigha, and mother was from a prominent family of lawyers. Fielding grew up on his parents farm at East Stour, Dotset. His mother died when Fielding was eleven, and when his father remarried, Henry was sent to Eton College (1719-1724), where he learned to love ancient Greek and Roman literature. During this period he also befriended George, later Lord, Lyttelton, and William Pitt, later Lord Chatham. To Lyttelton, his old school friend, who helped him from the late 1740s, Fielding dedicated the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). After Eton, he attempted to elope with his cousin Sarah Andrew. Encouraged by his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fielding began his literary career in London. In 1728 he wrote two plays, of which Love in Several Masques, performed at Drury Lane, ran only four nights. In the same year he went to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, enlarging his knowledge of classical literature. After returning to England, he devoted himself to writing for the stage. Under the pseudonym 'Sciblerus Secundus' he wrote comic-satirical burlesques, which made him the most successful playwrigh in the British theatre. His rival in the theatre was John Gay (1685-1732), the writer of the highly popular Beggar's Opera (1728). Fielding, a descendant of the Enlish ruling elite, believed in the benefits of a hierarchial social order, whereas Gay made no difference between criminals at the bottom of society and the corrupt elite at the top. . Fielding also became
a manager of the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. In 1730 he had four plays produced, among them Tom Thumb,
which is his most famous and popular drama, particularly in its revised version, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). According to a story, it made Swift laugh for the second time in
his life. In 1736 Fielding took over the management of the New Theatre, writing for it among others the comedy Pasquin. For several years Fielding's life was prosperous and full. His comedies earned him the title of "the English Molière". However, Fielding's sharp burlesques satirizing the government
gained the attention of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole and
Fielding's activities in theatre business was ended by Theatrical
Licensing Act – it has been said that the law was directed primarily at
him. In search for an alternative career Fielding became editor of the
magazine Champion,
an opposition journal. Fielding assumed the pen name Captain Hercules Vinegar. He
on one occasion wrote a piece ('The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian,
&c: For Writing a Book Intitled An Apology for His Life, &c.,
Being a Thorough Examination Thereof ...') demanding that Poet Laureate
Colley Cibber be tried for murder of the English language. Fielding
believed that Cibber was appointed to the post becausehe was a Whig. Alexander Pope mocked Cibber in his poem The Dunciad.
The writer and historian James Ralph, a friend of Benjamin Franklin,
collaborated with Fielding. He became sole editor of the journal in
1742. After studies of law Fielding was called in 1740 to the bar. Because of increasing illness – he suffered from gout and asthma – Fielding was eventually unable to continue as a Westminster justice. Physically Fielding was impressive, he was over six feet tall, with a "frame of a body large, and remarkably robust," as his first biographer, Arthur Murphy recorded. He was also known as a man with a great appetite for food, alcohol and tobacco; the joys of the rich diet he celebrated in the song 'The Roast Beef of Old England'. Between the years 1729 and 1737 Fielding wrote 25 plays but he acclaimed critical notice with his novels, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), a parody of Samuel Richardson's popular novel Pamela (1740-41). Although Fielding said
in Tom Jones, "That monstrous animal, a husband
and wife", he married in 1734 Charlotte Cradock, who became his
model for Sophia Western in Tom Jones and for the heroine of Amelia,
the author's last novel, which was dedicated to Ralph Allen. It was
written, as Fielding stated in the dedication, "promote the cause of
virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring evils, as well public as
private, which at present infest the country; though there is scarce,
as I remember, a single stroke of satire aimed at any one person
throughout the whole." In the story an army officer is imprisoned. His
virtuous wife resists all temptations and stays faithful to him. With Charlotte Fielding enjoyed ten years of happiness
until her death in 1744, leaving him with a small son and daughter.
Fielding had called her "one from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of
my life." Fielding's improvidence led to long periods of considerable
poverty. When someone told him that a mutual friend was unhappy due to
huge debts, Fielding replied: "How happy I should be if I could only
get 500 pounds deeper in debt than I am already." (The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes by Robert Hendrickson, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997, p. 101) At various periods of his life Fielding was greatly assisted by his friend Ralph Allen, the model for Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones. His wife's fortune Fielding spent in living and hospitality. He had a small income from his share of his parents' farm and a tiny annuity from an uncle. Secondly, that what is commonly called love, namely, the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human fles, is by no means that passion for which I here contend. This is indeed more properly hunger; and as no glutton is ashamed to apply the word love to his appetite, and to say he LOVES such and such dishes; so may the lover of this kind, with equal propriety say, he HUNGERS after such and such women. (from The History of Tom Jones, edited by R. P. C. Mutter, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 252) In 1747 Fielding caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel, who was six months pregnant at the time of the wedding – Fiending was condemned by many of his friends. Actually she was about to bear his child, and Fielding wished to save her from disgrace. In the six years of their marriage, Mary bore him five children. Following Sir Robert Walpole's replacement by another prime
minister, Fielding assume the role of a Whig ideologist. Before the
mid-1740s it was not clear to the general public what his political views actually were. In
the 'Prologue' to his play Pasquin
(1737) he said: "So does our Author, rumaging his Brain, / By various
Methods try to entertain; / Brings a strange Groupe of Characters
before you, / And shews you here at once both Whig and Tory; / Or, Court and Country Party you may call ´em: / But, without fear and favour he will maul ´em. / To you, then, mighty Sages of the Pit." (Pasquin, edited by O M Brack, Jr., William Kupersmith, Curt A. Zimansky, Iowa City: The University of Iowa, 1973, p. 5) Fielding's political satire The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743)
did not appear until after the fall of Walpole. "Roguery, and not a
Rogue, is my Subject," Fielding claimed. Walpole was called in the phrases
of his day, "His Honour," "Sir Bob," and the "Great Man." From A Dialogue Between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender (1745),
published anonymously, readers learned about a plan to impose the
Inquisition on England. Fielding published the last number of The Jacobite's Journal in November 1748. As a reward for
his governmental journalism Fielding was made justice of the peace for
the City of Westminster in 1748 and for the county of Middlesex in
1749. The position was unpaid, and thus not much admired, but he did not have a reputation of taking bribes. Together with
his half brother Sir
John Fielding, assistant Saunders Welch, and clerk Joshua Brodgen, he
established a new tradition of justice and suppression
of crime in London, organizing a detective force (with a salary), that
later developed into Scotland Yard. Fielding's writings became more
socially orientated – he opposed among others public hangings. From the court in Bow Street he continued his struggle against corruption and and saw successfully implemented a plan for breaking up the criminal gangs who were then flourishing in London. One of his most controversial cases was the riot after which a sailor was executed. As a vehicle for his ideas he used The Covent-Garden Journal. When the author's health was failing and he was forced to use crutches, he went with his wife, Margaret Collier, and one of his daughters to Portugal to recuperate in the milder air. His health badly damaged, Fielding died on October 8, 1754, in Lisbon. Fielding's travel book, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in which he recorded the unhappy journey, appeared posthumously in 1755. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, was enthusiastically revived by the general public,
if not by Richardson, Dr.
Johnson, and other literary figures. Coleridge declared that the plot of Tom Jones was one
of the three perfect plots in all literature, the others were Ben Jonson's Alchemist and
Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.
Fielding stated in Book I, Chapter 1: "In like manner, the excellence
of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the
author's skill in well dressing it up. How pleased therefore will the
reader be to find, that we have, in the following work, adhered closely
to one of the highest principles of the best cook which the present
age, or perhaps that of Heliogabalus, hath produced. This great man, as
is well known to all polite lovers of eating, begins at first by
setting plain things before his hungry guests, rising afterwards by
degrees, as their stomachs may be supposed to decrease, to the very
quintessence of sauce and spices. In like manner, we shall represent
Human Nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader, in that more
plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall
hereafter hash and ragoo it with all the high French and Italian
seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford." (The History of Tom Jones, pp. 52-53) Much of the action unfolds against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. The introductory chapters that preface each of the novel's 18 books address the reader in a way that was not common in English fiction. The kindly, prosperous Mr Allworthy finds a baby boy on his bed. He adopts the child, naming it Tom Jones. Allworthy suspects that Jenny Jones, a maid-servant to the wife of the schoolmaster Partridge, is the mother. Jenny leaves with Partridge the neighborhood. Allworthy's sister Bridget marries Captain Blifil, they have a son. Tom and the young and mean-spirited Blifil are raised together. Years later a rivalry over the attention of Sophia Western arises between them. Because of an affair with the gamekeeper's daughter Molly Seagrim, and because of Blifil's treachery, Tom is expelled from the house. He experiences adventures in the picaresque section of the novel, drifts into an affair with Lady Ballaston, nearly kills his opponent in a duel, and is imprisoned. Meanwhile Sophia flees to London to escape the marriage with Blifil. Jenny Jones turns up to reveal that Bridget is the mother of Tom, and Blifil's cruelties to Tom over the years are exposed – Blifil knew the truth of Tom's birth. Tom marries Sophia, who forgives him for his infidelities, and Tom becomes the heir of Allworthy. Ford Madox Ford's comment on the work was: "Obviously, marital bliss is possible to the wives of the worst of rakes and to the rakes themselves. But to convince us that that is the lot of one or other of his characters the writer must take much more trouble . . . and write much better." (The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times by Ford Madox Ford, London: George Allen and Unwin, second impression 1947, p. 540) Note: After novel established itself as a certain literary form in Britain, were novels often described as The Adventures of... Examples: The Life and Adventures of Mr Duncan Campbell by Daniel Defoe (1720); The Adventures of Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742); The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) by Charles Dickens, The Adventures of Philip by W.M. Thackeray (1861-62), The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871) by George Meredith. For further reading: biographies by W.L. Cross (3 vols, 1918) and F.H. Duddon (2 vols, 1952). Fielding and the Nature of the Novel by Robert Alter (1968); Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. by R. Paulson and T. Lockwood (1969); Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, ed. by K.G. Simpson (1986); Imagining the Penitentiary by John Bender (1987); Henry Fielding: A Life by Martin C. Battestin and Ruthe R. Battestin (1989); Natural Masques: Gender and Indentity in Fielding's Plays and Novels by Jill Campbell (1995); Critical Essays on Henry Fielding, ed. by Albert J. Rivero (1998); Henry Fielding: A Literary Life by Harold E. Pagliaro (1998); The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen and the Establishment of the Novel by Joy Alyson Parker (1998); Henry Fielding In Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference, edited by J. A. Downie (2008); A Political Biography of Henry Fielding by J. A. Downie (2009); Eighteenth-century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter (2016); Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics: from Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding by Marsha Keith Schuchard (2018) Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-century Britain by Ros Ballaster (2020); Limited Access: Transport Metaphors and Realism in the British Novel, 1740-1860 by Kyoko Takanashi (2022) Selected works:
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