Introduction

Summary

Henry Fielding was born on 22 April 1707 and this Companion thus appears in his tercentenary year. He died on 8 October 1754. In a life of less than fifty years he became the most important English playwright of his time, whom Shaw thought the 'greatest practising dramatist … between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century' apart from Shakespeare. He is also one of the great inaugural figures of the history of the novel, admired and imitated by Stendhal, Dickens, Thackeray, and other masters of the particular species of fiction that uses a strong controlling narrator. His novels were from the start written in self-conscious opposition to those of his rival Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), who represents an equally foundational but more self-effacing mode, in which the author purports to be invisible, and which aims at creating a feeling that the reader is witnessing real events rather than reading a story. Though not the only or the first important early novelists in Western literature, both writers represent, and helped decisively to shape, alternative styles of what was to become the dominant literary form of the modern world.

Fielding had aristocratic lineage and was educated at Eton. He was also continuously short of money, and experienced debt and various forms of low life as a penniless author and frequenter of taverns. His novels are laced with a lightly worn classical erudition, and have an ironic urbanity, partly worn as a badge of caste, but they also show a not wholly incompatible fondness for coarse popular entertainments. His manner derives to some extent from the satirical writers of the preceding generation, themselves spokesmen for a quasi-aristocratic ethos and a deep cultural loyalty to the ancient classics, who, while themselves mostly non-patrician, knew how to combine lordly hauteur with touches of demotic vulgarity.