Henry Fielding Biography Quotes 34 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Henry Fielding was born in 1707 in Somerset, England, into a family that mixed gentry standing with legal distinction. His father, Edmund Fielding, pursued a military career, while his mother, Sarah (Gould) Fielding, was the daughter of the judge Sir Henry Gould, whose standards of probity and learning left a strong imprint on the household. Fielding was educated at Eton College, where he absorbed a classical curriculum and sharpened a taste for irony, wit, and moral inquiry. He formed friendships that would matter to his later career, notably with George Lyttelton, whose encouragement and patronage would prove steady through the vicissitudes of the London literary world. After a period of legal study at the Middle Temple, Fielding spent time at the University of Leiden in the Low Countries, a stay cut short by finances but influential in broadening his classical and continental outlook.

Playwright and Satirist
Fielding first made his name in the theater. In the late 1720s and 1730s he produced a string of comedies and farces distinguished by quick pacing, burlesque exuberance, and a talent for exposing folly. Works such as Tom Thumb and Pasquin revealed a dramatist willing to aim his wit at fashionable affectation and, increasingly, at political corruption. His Historical Register reflected the combativeness of opposition writers who took aim at the long-running administration of Sir Robert Walpole. Fielding's fearless satire delighted audiences but also drew the attention of authorities. The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, passed in part in response to the audacity of plays like his, transformed the stage by placing new works under prior censorship. It also effectively ended his first career.

From Stage to Law and Journalism
Forced from the theater, Fielding returned to the law and made a new literary path in journalism and prose fiction. He wrote political commentary for the press, notably in The Champion, adopting a combative persona to argue for liberty of expression and against abuses of power. He resumed legal study in earnest and was called to the bar, establishing a modest practice that he supplemented with literary work. Throughout this period he relied on a circle that sustained him publicly and privately: his friend and patron George Lyttelton, his sister Sarah Fielding, herself a novelist of rising reputation, and the benevolent Bath entrepreneur Ralph Allen, whose example of practical virtue would echo in Fielding's fiction.

The Novelist
Fielding's breakthrough as a novelist came as a playful quarrel with the most talked-about book of his day. Samuel Richardson's Pamela had electrified readers with a tale of virtue under siege; Fielding's anonymous Shamela teased its moral pretensions. From that provocation he built something more enduring in Joseph Andrews (1742), whose preface famously sketched his ambition to write a "comic epic in prose". Joseph Andrews retained the high-spirited parody but added generosity of feeling and a panoramic view of English life, anchored by the unforgettable Parson Adams. Fielding pursued deeper satire in The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, exposing the rhetoric of "greatness" as a mask for criminality.

His masterwork, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), fused a generous moral vision with structural daring. A commanding narrator, philosophical digressions, and a plotted design of remarkable symmetry supplied the frame for a lively social world. In characters such as the benevolent Squire Allworthy and the spirited Sophia Western, readers felt the impress of people Fielding knew well; contemporaries recognized in Allworthy a likeness to Ralph Allen, whose quiet charity Fielding admired. The novel's breadth of sympathy, comic energy, and ethical clarity established a modern standard for the form. Amelia (1751) turned to darker hues, tracing the trials of a steadfast marriage and the strains that urban vice and legal disorder placed on ordinary virtue. Even in its graver tone, it retained his abiding interest in justice tempered by compassion.

Magistrate and Reformer
Fielding's sense of public duty found a new arena when he accepted work as a magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. Sitting at Bow Street, he confronted the realities of street crime, gin-fueled disorder, and the fragile machinery of metropolitan justice. With organizational talent and moral resolve, he helped professionalize detection and prosecution. Under his leadership, and with the active assistance of his half-brother John Fielding, steps were taken toward a more coordinated system of policing, later associated with the Bow Street Runners. Fielding spoke to policy as well as practice in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), urging measures against drunkenness, corruption, and poverty that fed criminality. He also returned to print in The Covent-Garden Journal, where he combined literary debate with a magistrate's eye for social reform, arguing that effective justice required both institutional improvement and civic virtue.

Personal Ties and Literary Circle
Fielding's private life informed his art in ways contemporaries readily sensed. His first marriage, to Charlotte Craddock, left a lasting emotional legacy; she was widely thought to have inspired the tenderness and integrity of heroines such as Sophia Western and Amelia. After Charlotte's death, Fielding married Mary Daniel, who had been closely connected with his household; the couple had children and managed a growing family amid his burdens of work and ill health. His family circle remained central: Sarah Fielding continued to write fiction of her own, and John Fielding would carry forward Bow Street's work with distinction. Fielding engaged vigorously with fellow writers and artists. Samuel Richardson, the great epistolary novelist, was both foil and stimulus; the dialogue between their approaches to fiction sharpened the identity of the English novel. William Hogarth's satiric canvases and Fielding's comic prose moved in parallel, each exposing hypocrisy while pressing moral claims. Patronage and friendship from George Lyttelton and practical support from Ralph Allen provided the stability that enabled his mature achievement.

Final Years and Legacy
By the early 1750s, chronic illness, including gout and complications that weakened his strength, threatened his ability to work. Seeking a more temperate climate and the hope of recovery, he sailed for Lisbon in 1754. The journey, observed with candor and stoic humor in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, revealed his persistent curiosity and compassion even as his body failed. He died later that year and was buried in Lisbon.

Fielding's legacy rests on a double foundation: the invention of a capacious comic novel that could reconcile satire with benevolence, and the practical reform of urban justice at a moment when London urgently needed it. He synthesized classical poetics with contemporary observation, producing narratives whose narrators argued, amused, and instructed in equal measure. Around him stood a network of family, patrons, and peers whose influence he acknowledged in art and action: Sarah and John Fielding, George Lyttelton, Ralph Allen, Samuel Richardson, and others who defined his literary and civic world. In life as in fiction, he tested human conduct against principles of reason and charity, leaving a body of work that shaped the possibilities of the English novel and the expectations of public service.

Our collection contains 34 quotes who is written by Henry, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Love.

Other people realated to Henry: Miguel de Cervantes (Novelist), John Barth (Novelist), Arthur Murphy (Writer)