A Biographical Sketch, 1707–50

Abstract

Henry Fielding was a man whose vital presence one can sense in his works but whose complex nature it is hard to synthesize. Tall and well built, strong-featured rather than conventionally handsome, he was sometimes a bully but more often an entertaining friend, whether in a grave or happy mood. He indulged his strong appetites for love, gaming, food, wine and snuff. He enjoyed success as a playwright of comedy, a theatre manager, a lawyer, a magistrate and a novelist; and he wrote extensively in several genres besides drama and prose fiction. He was passionate and gentle, conventionally ‘masculine’ and yet complex in his attitudes towards sex and gender, learned and down-to-earth, often in need of money and a spendthrift, highly sensitive to criticism from others and firm in his convictions, proud of his aristocratic ancestry and protective of the poor, in religion latitudinarian and intolerant of Catholics and Jews, sexually self-indulgent in his youth and a doting husband, brilliant both in rational discourse and in the dramatic art of burlesque, severe in his recommendations for criminal punishment and charitable as a magistrate. Fielding was above all deeply moral, believing that a compassionate human community, centred on loving marriage, was an ideal that should guide our actions. By and large, he lived according to his beliefs. But at times his own strong passions and appetites, which typically energized his principles, might undercut them, if only briefly.