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HENRY FIELDING: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
The outspoken eighteenth-century man of letters, Samuel
Johnson, wrote to a woman who had read the novel Tom Jones:
I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am
sorry to hear you have read it: a confession which no modest
lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.
That's an unusual judgment about a landmark book in the
history of world literature, but it's a sample of the kind of
passionate response--both favorable and unfavorable--Tom Jones
has inspired since it was published. Its author, Henry
Fielding, was born on April 22, 1707, in Somerset, in southwest
England, the area where his hero is born and raised. Unlike
Tom, Fielding had no doubts about his aristocratic lineage. His
father was a lieutenant general who had fought against the
forces of the great French king, Louis XIV. His mother was the
granddaughter of Sir Henry Gold, a baron of the exchequer.
But if the Fieldings' social position was secure, their
financial situation was shaky. Like most aristocrats, the young
Fielding grew to have expensive tastes. Unlike many, he had no
way of affording them. For much of his life, he would be like
Tom Jones, frequently standing in some lavish drawing room
talking to nobility, while wondering how he would pay his own
rent. First educated by tutors, he was then sent to Eton, the
finest English boarding school. But where other young men of
his background and intelligence would have continued on to
Cambridge or Oxford University, he didn't, probably because his
family could not afford the tuition. Later, he broke off his
legal studies at the University of Leyden, in Holland, for the
same reason. He made the most of the education he did receive,
though, picking up the dazzling familiarity with classical
authors that he displays so artfully in his writing.
In 1734 Fielding eloped with Charlotte Cradock. The model
for Sophia in Tom Jones, Charlotte was his great love--the one,
he declared, "from whom I draw all the solid comfort of my
life." Like Sophia, she was both beautiful and an heiress. The
newlyweds settled happily in rural Dorsetshire, but within a
year they were back in London, having run through most of
Charlotte's fortune.
Meanwhile, Fielding had taken up writing plays. According to
the great twentieth-century playwright George Bernard Shaw,
Fielding was "the greatest dramatist, with the single exception
of Shakespeare, produced by England between the Middle Ages and
the nineteenth century." Most critics, however, don't find his
