Fielding, HENRY, born at Sharpham Park, Glastonbury, April 22, 1707, was the son of Lieutenant (afterwards General) Edmund Fielding, who belonged to the younger branch of the Denbigh family. He went to Eton, which he left before November 1725. After a boyish and frustrate love-affair at Lyne Regis with a relative and an heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew (see Atheneum, 2d June 1883), he passed to Leyden University, where he appears to have graduated in March 1728. But he must have returned to England before this, because his first comedy, Love in Several Masques, was produced at Drury Lane in February. The Temple Beau followed two years later. From this date until February 1735 he wrote a number of comedies and farces, the best of which are The Author's Faree (1730), the burlesque of Tom Thumb, afterwards The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730), Don Quixote in England (1734), The Mock Doctor (1732) and The Miser (1733), two adaptations from Molière, and The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), an adaptation from Regnard. His dramatic works in general bear signs of haste and carelessness. A brief interval in their rapid manufacture which occurred between 1735 and 1736 is supposed to have been filled by his marriage to Miss Charlotte Cradock, a Salisbury beauty and his acknowledged model for 'Sophia Western' (Tom Jones, book xiii. chap. i.).
For a few months Fielding appears to have led the life of a country gentleman at East Stour in Dorsetshire, where he had resided as a boy. But his wife's fortune of £1500 was not inexhaustible, and early in 1736 (probably with what remained of it) he took the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, where he brought out two very successful burlesques—Pasquin (1736) and the Historical Register (1737). The bold satire on the ministry contained in these pieces led to the precipitate passing of the Licensing Act of 1737, which made the consent of the lord chamberlain necessary to the representation of any play. This effectually closed Fielding's theatre, and in November 1737 he became a student of the Middle Temple. He was called to the bar in 1740, and travelled the western circuit. But, though he does not seem to have neglected law, he did not relinquish literature. During his studentship he edited (with James Ralph) the Champion, a paper of the Spectator type. His real début, however, came in 1742, not long after Richardson published his popular Pamela. Apt at burlesque and eminently manly, Fielding's genius saw at once how effectively ridiculous the feeble side of Richardson's morality might be made by transferring his heroine's difficulties to a male hero. Designing at first no more than raillery, his plan grew under his hand, and gradually became a novel of life and manners, with a group of characters, of which one, Parson Abraham Adams (based on the writer's friend, William Young) is immortal. His success probably revealed to him a power he had scarcely suspected, and opened a wider perspective of fiction. But for the moment his precarious means prompted no more than the publication by subscription of three volumes of Miscellanies, made up mainly of early work. They included another play, The Wedding Day, an old comedy revised for Garrick, and produced at Drury Lane without success in February 1743, some essays, some youthful verse, a clever Lucianic fragment called A Journey from this World to the Next, and the surpassing study in irony known as the History of the Life of the late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. Despite its maturity, it had probably been written before Joseph Andrews, as it seems unlikely that after so signal a success its writer would have essayed a line so different.
From the preface to the Miscellanies it is clear that Fielding's circumstances at this date were far from good. His means were uncertain, his health already broken (he was a martyr to gout), and his beautiful wife an invalid. Shortly after April 1743, when the book was published, she seems to have died, leaving him so heart-broken by her loss that his friends feared for his reason. From the preface to his sister's novel of David Simple (2d ed. 1744), he still appears to have hoped for success at the bar. But in 1745 he again drifted into journalism as the author of the True Patriot, a government organ, succeeded in 1747 by the Jacobite's Journal. In November 1747 he married his wife's maid, Mary Daniel, who had remained in charge of his children by his first marriage; and a year later, by the interest of his schoolfellow Lyttleton, he became a justice of the peace for Westminster, moving into a house in Bow Street belonging to the Duke of Bedford. Thence in February 1749 he put forth a second novel, his famous Tom Jones, the 'labour,' he says, 'of some years.' Less than three years later came a third novel, Amelia. The remainder of his life was a continued struggle with ill-health and a harassing vocation, which he nevertheless followed most assiduously. His further literary efforts are confined to a few pamphlets, philanthropic and professional, and a fresh periodical, the Covent Garden Journal (1752). In 1754, sinking under a complication of disorders, but gallantly struggling with his magisterial duties to the last, he quitted England for Lisbon in search of health. After a voyage of many vicissitudes, narrated with the most touching and manly cheerfulness in his posthumously printed Journal, he reached the Portuguese capital, where he died two months later, 8th October 1754, aged forty-eight. He was buried in the English cemetery. Luget Britannia gremio non dari fovere natum, says the inscription on his tomb.
The only portrait of Fielding is a sketch from memory by his friend Hogarth, whose works he greatly admired. Representing him in later life, it exhibits little more than the shadow of that handsome Harry Fielding who at twenty rushed upon London from Leyden in all the ardour of health and animal spirits. He paid the penalty of his youthful appetite for pleasure by a broken and laborious middle age, endured with a courage and fortitude which command respect. Of his work his three novels now chiefly survive. His plays were hasty and ill-considered productions; and he is best in pure burlesque, or when he takes his plot ready-made. His essays and journalism are hack-work. But he is fairly what Scott calls him, the 'Father of the English Novel.' In Joseph Andrews he first felt his feet; in Tom Jones he perfected his method and put forth his full powers. When Coleridge extravagantly praised its plot, the modern novel was yet young, and the dictum now needs qualification. But the skill and variety of the book, its close characterisation, its happiness of illustration, and the wealth of wit, wisdom, and irony cannot be contested. There are—and it is to be regretted—pages which show an artistic insensibility, and an over-indulgence to certain forms of masculine frailty which even the manners of the time cannot wholly excuse; but apart from this there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the moral purpose proclaimed. Amelia, a shorter, more subdued, and less elaborated work, has also its admirers. But Fielding put his best 'criticism of life' into Tom Jones.
His biography has been written by Murphy (1762), Watson (1807), Lawrence (1855), and Austin Dobson in the 'Men of Letters' series (1883, revised ed. 1889). Thackeray's sympathetic lecture and Mr Leslie Stephen's valuable introduction to the édition de luxe of 1882 cannot be neglected.