Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (1707–1754), born at Sharpham Park in Somerset into a family of gentry, was one of the founders of the English novel and the author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), the most exuberant and architecturally brilliant comic novel in the English language. Before he turned to fiction, he was the most successful dramatist on the London stage; after he turned to fiction, he became a pioneering magistrate who helped establish London’s first professional police force. He packed several careers into forty-seven years.

Life and Career

Fielding was educated at Eton and briefly at the University of Leiden. He began writing for the theatre at twenty, and over the next decade produced some twenty-five plays, including the political satires The Author’s Farce (1730), Tom Thumb (1730), and Pasquin (1736). His savage attacks on Robert Walpole’s government were so effective that they provoked the Licensing Act of 1737, which imposed censorship on the London stage and effectively ended Fielding’s theatrical career.

Forced out of the theatre, Fielding trained as a lawyer, was called to the bar, and began writing fiction. Shamela (1741), a brilliant parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, was his opening shot in one of the great literary rivalries. Joseph Andrews (1742), begun as a further Pamela parody, evolved into something richer: a picaresque novel of English life on the road, featuring the immortal Parson Adams — the most lovable character in eighteenth-century fiction.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) is his masterpiece: a novel of over 350,000 words, divided into eighteen books, following the adventures of a foundling of uncertain parentage through English society from country estate to London. The plot — with its intricate mechanism of concealed identities, mistaken motives, and perfectly timed revelations — is the most elaborately constructed in the English novel before Dickens. Coleridge called it one of the three most perfect plots in all literature (alongside Oedipus Rex and The Alchemist).

In 1748 Fielding was appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex. He was a reforming magistrate who worked to combat the gin epidemic, organized crime, and the chaotic state of London law enforcement. With his blind half-brother John Fielding, he established the Bow Street Runners, the precursor to the Metropolitan Police.

His health deteriorated rapidly in his final years. He sailed for Lisbon in 1754 seeking a warmer climate and died there on 8 October 1754, aged forty-seven. His Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon was published posthumously.

Major Works and Themes

Fielding called Joseph Andrews “a comic epic poem in prose” — a formulation that captures his ambition to create a new literary form with the scope of Homer and the comedy of Cervantes. His narrative voice — genial, ironic, omniscient, and constantly addressing the reader — is his greatest innovation: it established the model for the English comic narrator that runs through Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, and onward.

Tom Jones is simultaneously a love story, a social panorama, a moral comedy, and a meditation on the relationship between nature and nurture, virtue and reputation. Its generous vision of human nature — Tom is flawed but good-hearted; the novel forgives what it cannot condone — stands in deliberate contrast to Richardson’s anxious moralism.

Jonathan Wild (1743) is a savage ironic biography that equates the career of a real-life criminal with that of a “great man” — a political satire that anticipates The Beggar’s Opera tradition.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Fielding and Richardson divided the eighteenth century between them: Richardson’s partisans (including Johnson) valued moral seriousness and psychological depth; Fielding’s partisans valued breadth, humour, and formal inventiveness. The rivalry is the origin of the two great traditions of the English novel — the novel of consciousness (Richardson, Austen, James) and the novel of social panorama (Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray).

Key Works

• The Author’s Farce (1730)
• Tom Thumb (1730)
• Shamela (1741)
• Joseph Andrews (1742)
• Jonathan Wild (1743)
• Tom Jones (1749)
• Amelia (1751)
• Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755, posthumous)

Collecting Fielding

Eighteenth-century Fielding first editions are a well-established and expensive collecting field.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749, Andrew Millar, London) was published in six volumes. First editions are identified by the Millar imprint and the presence of the errata leaf. Complete sets in contemporary or near-contemporary calf bring $10,000–$50,000 depending on condition; individual volumes surface more commonly.

Joseph Andrews (1742, Millar) in two volumes is scarce in first edition; copies bring $3,000–$15,000. Amelia (1751, Millar) in four volumes is somewhat more common.

Shamela (1741) was published anonymously and is exceptionally rare in first edition — one of the most difficult eighteenth-century English literary firsts to obtain. Copies bring $5,000–$20,000.

Fielding’s dramatic works — the plays of the 1730s — are collected by specialists in eighteenth-century theatre and are generally less expensive than the novels, though Tom Thumb (1730) and Pasquin (1736) are scarce.