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Biography and Characterization: Henry Fielding (1707-1754). David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays

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Biography and Characterization: Henry Fielding (1707-1754). David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record David J. Brewer, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Essays.  1900. Biography and Characterization:
Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
By William Vincent Byars (1857–1938) FIELDING’S best work as an essayist was done, no doubt, in the Covent Garden Journal, a periodical of the school of the Spectator and Whig Examiner which he himself founded in January, 1752. This was not his first experience in periodical literature, for he was a professional journalist, as well as a professional lawyer, a professional playwright, and a professional novelist. In 1745 he had issued the True Patriot, and in December, 1747, the Jacobite Journal, neither of which was long-lived. Steadiness of purpose was not one of the gifts which made him the first great English novelist, and the Covent Garden Journal, edited by Sir Alexander Drawcansir, of Great Britain, did not outlive the year in which it was founded. It would not have lived in vain, however, if the sole end of its existence had been to bring into the world one such essay as that of its tenth number on “Reading for Amusement.” It is by no means the only one in which Fielding shows his genius, but unfortunately the Covent Garden Journal, though correct in its intentions and highly moral in its purposes, does not always employ a “terminology” which more modern taste can approve. Fielding’s most elaborate effort as an essayist, “An Essay on Conversation,” is characterized by passages of striking brilliancy, but in sustained strength it does not equal the best of his shorter essays.

1   He was born near Glastonbury, in Somersetshire, England, April 22d, 1707. His father, who represented a younger branch of the aristocratic Denbigh family, noticed by Gibbon as descended from the same ancestry with the Hapsburgs, was by no means over wealthy, and it is supposed that when he sent his son to be educated at Leyden for the English bar it was because life at German universities was cheaper than at English. Fielding studied law at the Middle Temple after his return from Germany, and was admitted to the bar, but he soon became a prolific playwright, then a journalist and finally a novelist. His early training for the bar may have helped him when he was appointed a magistrate in latter life, but he did not increase his fortune greatly by it, as he writes with pride that he had managed to reduce his magistrate’s fees of “the dirtiest money on earth” from £500 to £300 a year. For “Tom Jones,” written during this period, he received £600 and for “Amelia” £1,000, so that by “inventing the modern novel” he certainly did better financially than it is likely he ever could have done at the London bar or as the most exacting of country ’squires. His last work, “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” was written in 1754,—the year in which he died at Lisbon, where he had gone for his health. When Fielding was born in 1707, De Foe, who lived until 1731, was forty-six years old. “Robinson Crusoe” appeared in 1719, “The Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell” in 1720, and “Captain Singleton” in the same year. Richardson’s “Pamela” appeared in 1741, and a year later Fielding entered fiction with “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Andrews,” his parody on “Pamela,” which showed him his strength and led him to write “Tom Jones,” in 1749. The evolution of the modern novel from De Foe through Richardson is thus apparent, but it is within bounds to call “Tom Jones” the first modern novel, as is so often done, for though it was preceded in English literature by several of the best stories in any modern language, it is the first love story in which the characters move through the whole plot with definite and distinct individualities towards a conclusion, planned in advance as carefully as the climax of a drama, and developing by apparent necessity from every act, even the most trivial, of all the characters whose lives are a part of the destiny of the book. The room for art in such a microcosm as this is as infinite as the power of genius to take hold on nature, and Fielding was the first to realize it in English prose fiction.

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