Contents introduction Chapter I. Henry Fielding – a biography

1.2. Personal Life
Like Tom Jones, it took some time for Fielding to learn to be cautious. His early and middle years were marked by "the strength of Rabelais in his bodily appetite". Fielding aggravated the gout he suffered later in life by enjoying many things, including food, drink, tobacco, sex, and gambling. Fielding was a "good libertine" whose excesses were partially improved in 1734 by his marriage to Charlotte Cradock, inspired by the love of his life and Sophia West.
Charlotte's dowry of £1,500 did not last long. Like his father, Fielding's relationship with money was legendary. Fielding was sued several times for debts, but because of his natural generosity, he continued to borrow for his own needs, lending money to friends who were worse off than him. In November 1747, three years after Charlotte's death, Fielding married his maid, Mary Daniel, who was six months pregnant. The marriage became a public scandal, but Fielding did what he had done for the young Mr Bulbul Nancy by "making Mary an honest woman".
Fielding was traditionally born into a family descended from the Habsburg branch. The Earl of Denbig William Fielding was a direct ancestor, while Henry's father, Colonel Edmund Fielding, served under the Duke of Marlborough John Churchill in the early 18th century, "with great courage and authority". His mother was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a King's Bench judge who inherited property at East Stours in Dorset , where the family moved when Fielding was three years old. His mother died before he was 11 years old. After his father remarried, Fielding was sent to Eton College, where he developed a love of literature and a good knowledge of the classics. There he later befriended George Lyttelton, a statesman and important patron.³
Leaving school at 17 and becoming a handsome young man, he settled into the life of young gentlemen; but four years later, having failed with an heir and having staged a play at the Drury Lane Theater in London, he continued his classical studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. After 18 months, she was forced to return home because her father was unable to pay her child support. According to him, "he had no other choice but to be a hired writer or a hockey player", he chose the former and began working as a playwright. In total, he wrote about 25 plays. Although his dramatic works were not staged, their ingenuity cannot be denied. He was essentially a satirist; for example, The Author's Farsi (1730) shows the absurdity of writers and publishers, and The Rape in Rape (1730) alludes to the injustice of the law and lawyers. His target was often the political corruption of the day. In 1737 he created his own historical register for 1736 at the Little Theater in Hay later the Haymarket Theatre in London, where the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was scarcely publicized and viciously ridiculed. This was not the first time that Walpole had suffered from Fielding's pen, and in response he passed a Licensing Bill in Parliament that required all new plays to be approved and licensed before being developed by Lord Cumberland.
The passage of this act marked the end of Fielding's career as a playwright. The 30-year-old writer had a wife and two children, but no source of income. He married Charlotte Cradock in 1734, this time after a successful escape that culminated in a four-year acquaintance. How much she loves him can be seen from the two characters based on her - Sophia Western in Tom Jones and Amelia in the novel of the same name: one because she looks like a beautiful, frisky, generous girl, the other because she is faithful, as very caring, hardworking wife and mother. To reclaim his fortune, Fielding began studying at the bar and typically completed six or seven courses in less than three years. During his studies, he also edited and wrote mainly for the Champion newspaper, which was published three times a week; or British Mercury from November 1739 to June 1741. This was just as strong against Jacob as it was in his later journalistic writings.
as an attorney for the Western District, had less success. However, in 1740, Samuel Richardson published his novel Pamela, or "Rewarded with Virtue," in which a maid resisted any attempt to seduce her mistress, so astounding her master that she eventually became "a novelty in literature," his success was unprecedented. "It was followed by imitations. In April 1741, a parody of an apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, a satirist on Richardson's feelings and morals, appeared. It was published anonymously . And although Fielding never claimed it, Shamela as a whole was considered the work of her life , and stylistic evidence supports this attribute.⁴
Joseph Andrews' by Fielding was published anonymously in 1742. The title page describes the author as "the author of Don Quixote, imitating the style of Cervantes", which begins as Pamela's burlesque , when Pamela's virtuous infantry brother, Joseph, resists the attempts. a woman born high to seduce him. Soon the parodic intention becomes secondary, and the novel becomes a masterpiece of constant ridicule and social criticism, centered on Parson Adams, one of the great comedians of literature and a brilliant confirmation of the 19th century debate. Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky argues that a positive person can only be trusted in fiction if he is portrayed with a certain sense of humor. Fielding explains in his preface that he is writing "a comic epic prose poem". He certainly opened up a new genre in fiction.
Joseph Andrews wrote under the most unfortunate circumstances: Fielding was afflicted with gout , his six-year-old daughter was dying, and his wife was "not in very good condition". He also ran into financial difficulties, at least temporarily, thanks to the generosity of his friend, the philanthropist Ralph Allen, who appeared as Mr. Allworthy in " Tom Jones".
In 1743 Fielding published three volumes of old and new writings , the most important of which is the Life of Mr. Jonathan Wilde . Here, speaking about the life of a famous criminal of that period , Fielding confuses the greatness of a person, more precisely, the greatness of a person, with his power over others. The ever-present "Jonathan Wilde" is the most terrifying satire and merciless satirical exercise in the English language, with the exception of some passages from his older contemporary, the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.
Fielding stopped writing the Miscellany for more than two years , partly because he was disappointed with the copyright awards, partly because of his devotion to the law. His health was poor; his bar practice did not flourish; Worst of all, his wife was still sick. In the autumn of 1744 he took her to Banya to the healing waters; he "caught a fever and died in his arms". In the 18th century , Mary Wortley Montagu , a letter writer and Fielding's cousin, said that her grief had "closed to anger" and that it had been almost a year since she regained her strength . He then bought a house in the Strand (now a courthouse) in London, where he lived with his daughter, his sister Sarah, and Mary Daniel, his wife's writer and servant. In 1747, mocking London , he married Mary, who was pregnant. According to Fielding, shortly before her death, she wrote that she had "emptied herself very well and that all the tender offices had become female characters…Besides being a faithful friend, a loving comrade, and a loving nanny."
In 1745, the Jacobite rebellion began an attempt to restore the descendants of the captive King James II Stuart, forcing Fielding to write the pamphlet "A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain." Some of the consequences of the present uprising are quite obvious. Now everyone should be considered a lover of their homeland .” As a supporter of the Church of England, he warned of the consequences of a Roman Catholic rebellion led by the pretender to the throne, Prince Charles Edward. A month later he became editor of a new weekly newspaper, The Real Patriot: and the History of Our Ages, and wrote almost alone until the defeat of the plaintiff at the Battle of Couloden (April 16) stopped publication (1746). After this, Fielding edited another newspaper: The Jacobite's Journal, a weekly newspaper whose title reflected his satirical approach to current events.⁵
Fielding was now a staunch supporter of the government. His reward came in 1748 when at Westminster and Middlesex , when he had his own courthouse, which was his residence in Bow Street, central London. There was no salary in the office; Former Bow Street judges went to great lengths to pay bribes and often paid bribes from the persons who delivered them to them. Fielding was a judge of a different order. He, along with his blind half-brother John Fielding, was a magistrate who turned a dishonorable office into an office of great dignity and importance, and established a new tradition in London of the suppression of justice and crime. Among other things, Fielding strengthened the police force at his disposal, bringing in strong and energetic "thieves " - Bow Street runners . To improve relations between the law and the public, he opened The Covent Garden Journal , which regularly features the following articles:
All persons who in the future will suffer from brigands, thieves, etc., should immediately bring or send to Henry the best description, time, place, and circumstances of such brigands, etc. Fielding, Esq., at his house in Bow Street.
Fielding's first play was performed in February 1728 at Drury Lane. However, for reasons that can only be guessed at, from March 1728 to April 1729 Fielding studied for two semesters at the University of Leiden. The uncertainty is about what he is studying and why he left. At the end of 1729 Fielding returned to London. His second play , The Pretty Boy's Temple , was staged in January 1730. Over the next seven years, Fielding wrote 18 plays, most of which satirized Prime Minister Robert Walpole and his government. In 1737, an "obscene and rebellious Persian", Walpole's prominent The Golden Ass , led to the passage of the Licensing Act, ending Fielding's theatrical career. On November 1, 1737, Fielding took the formal steps necessary to begin his study of law.
The Tom Jones Story is a comic novel by the English playwright and writer Henry Fielding, better known as Tom Jones. This is both a Bildungsroman and a Picaresque novel. It was first published in London on February 28, 1749 and is one of the oldest English prose works classified as a novel 1 - an old novel. top ten novels in the world.2 It contains a total of 346,747 words divided into 18 small books, each with a discursive section on topics often unrelated to the book itself. It is dedicated to George Littleton .
novel , it is well organized. Samuel Taylor Coleridge notes that it has "one of the three most perfect plots ever planned". It became a bestseller, with four editions published in its first year.
Tom Jones is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and an impressive English novel.⁶
Due to financial necessity, Fielding's career as a political journalist went hand in hand with his career as a lawyer, including his work on the bench. Fielding's experiments with fiction began in 1740, and his first published work, Shamela , appeared in 1741. In 1749, before Tom Jones was published, several other works appeared. Theatrical metaphors are noted in many of Fielding's early works, but as his legal education developed, court metaphors came to dominate. As this article shows, Fielding's use of legal and judicial metaphors has reached its peak.
Fielding was admitted to the Middle Temple on June 20, 1740, and completed the simple seven-year course in over two and a half years. Fielding's intelligence and hard work played their part, but the influence of his uncle, David Gould, helped him gain early recognition. Around this time, Fielding, one of about 200 lawyers, joined the elite profession, but his "lower ranks were neither respectable nor paid". Fielding kept rooms in the temple for less than 6 months. He walked the Western Circle when his health permitted, but relied on his written income. ⁹ However, Fielding was true to the law and in 1747 tried to get into court.
Fielding was sworn in on 25 October 1748 by the Westminster Commission; and after obtaining a property qualification, he was sworn in on 13 January 1749 at the nearby Middlesex Commission. As a basis , judicial duties include the maintenance of public order and the detection of crimes, as well as the daily administration of justice. the post is unpaid; income was received from payments related to various duties and unofficially from bribes. Unlike his predecessor, Sir Thomas de Weill, Fielding was not rich in this work. Fielding was a strict but ordinary judge, and there is no evidence that he used this position for personal gain. Taking advantage of his position, Fielding advocated legislative reform, sending a bill to prevent street robberies to the Lord Chancellor in July 1749 and calling for criminal law and social reform, wrote several pamphlets. Fielding used his editorship of the Covent-Garden Journal in order to highlight the "public and private evils" that he could not master as a master. One of Fielding's enduring legacies was the establishment of the Bow Street Runners, London's first permanent paid police force.
Fielding's health had already deteriorated, deteriorating rapidly under the stress of his job. "Skinny" Fielding, who suffered from gout, jaundice, dropsy, and asthma, heard his last work on Bow Street in May 1754. On the advice of a physician, Fielding sailed to Lisbon, where he died on 8 October 1754 at the age of 47.