Henry Fielding
1707–1754 · England
“It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Henry Fielding
Drew From(3)
who shaped Henry Fielding
via Don Quixote
- Tom Jones is Fielding's English answer to Don Quixote — he admired Cervantes openly and set out to copy him
- He'd already declared the debt on the title page of Joseph Andrews ("in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes"); here it shows in the Jones/Partridge travel pairing, modeled directly on Quixote and Sancho
- Read the Don first and the comic-epic shape — the rogue's progress, the master-and-servant double act — arrives already familiar
- The mock-epic only works because the real epic is so familiar — and Fielding names Homer (with Aristotle) as his model
- The churchyard brawl and the Mrs. Partridge episode are Iliad battle-scenes in disguise, narrated with Homer's own extended similes
- Knowing how Homer pitches a duel between heroes is what makes Fielding's grand treatment of a village fistfight land as comedy
via The Aeneid
- The epic frame Fielding is grafting onto a foundling's story — Tom's journey to his true home is plotted as an Aeneid-style homecoming
- Fielding borrows Virgil's one-year time-scheme and scatters Virgilian tags and Muse-invocations throughout
- Knowing the Aeneid lets you catch the joke and the ambition at once — Fielding is claiming epic stature for the comic novel
Inspired(3)
who Henry Fielding shaped
- Fielding's sprawling, generous comic novel is the picaresque tradition Dickens consciously wrote David Copperfield into
- The homage was personal: while writing the novel, Dickens named his newborn son Henry Fielding Dickens
- Tom Jones even turns up inside the story — David lists it among his dead father's books, "a glorious host, to keep me company"
via Vanity Fair
- Fielding's chatty, intrusive narrator — stepping out from behind the story to comment, judge, and steer — is the model Thackeray inherited a century later for Vanity Fair
- Thackeray venerated him publicly, devoting part of his 1853 lectures on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century to Fielding
- But Vanity Fair is also an argument with Tom Jones: Thackeray subtitled his book "A Novel Without a Hero" precisely because he thought Fielding's flawed foundling was no one to admire
- The novel Austen grew up inside — her family read Tom Jones aloud, and her teenage burlesque Henry and Eliza lifts Fielding's foundling heroine and indulgent narrator wholesale
- Fielding invented the warm, ironic, godlike narrator who arranges his characters' fates and winks at the reader — the voice Pride and Prejudice perfects
- His tight comic plotting, where every accident pays off by the last chapter, is the engine Austen inherited and refined into something quieter and sharper
Portraits
The definitive likeness: Hogarth drew Fielding's profile from memory ~8 years after his death (no life portrait survives); engraved by Basire for the 1762 Works of Henry Fielding. NPG copy.
William Hogarth, 1762
American steel engraving (Library of Congress) reproducing the Hogarth profile — a widely circulated 19th-c. reprint likeness of Fielding.
John Chester Buttre, 1840
Famous Quotes
“An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.”
“It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.”
“The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature.”
“A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.”
About Henry Fielding
English novelist and dramatist, one of the founders of the English novel. Tom Jones, his masterpiece, is a sprawling, good-humored panorama of eighteenth-century English life. He also served as a magistrate and helped establish the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.