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3. Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
Life
    Henry Fielding was born in 1707 in a declining aristocratic family. He was sent to Eden for early education. In 1728, he studied at the University of Leyden in Holland, but he stopped it in the next year because of his poor family. Then he returned to London and began his playwright’s career to support himself. In 1736, Fielding bought the Little Theatre in Hay market with his friend to play his own theatrical troupe. However, the passing of Sir Robert Walpole’s Licensing Act of 1737, together with rigid censorship, put an end to Fielding’s Little Theatre as well as his career as playwright. Then he turned to law and finished the normal seven-year course of study with three years. During this period, he still employed his pen in writing novels. He wrote 4 great novels, among which Tom Jones is his masterpiece. In 1748, Fielding took the post of Justice of the Peace for Westminster, a district in London. He worked so hard that his health became worse and worse. In October 1754, he died in Lisbon.

Literary Career
     Although Fielding started as a dramatist and then turned to write novels, he was chiefly known as novelist. He together wrote 20-odd plays and 4 great novels. From 1729 to 1737 was the brief period of Fielding’s drama writing. There are regular comedies, adaptations from the French, farces, burlesques and dramatic satires among his plays. In these plays, Fielding pitilessly exposed the English courts, the parliamentary system and the corruption of state officials. Yet Fielding was good at burlesques and dramatic satires. As a satirist, he attacked all his contemporary social evils in a ridiculous tone, such as the corrupted politics, the unjust law, the depraved high classes, etc. As a dramatist, Fielding successfully dramatized the real life of his time. Therefore, his dramatic theory and practice conformed to the theory of “a return to nature” and the dogma that “the stage should be a school of morality” in the Enlightenment period. Fielding’s still-remembered dramas are followings:
Comedy          The Coffee-House Politician (1730)
Ballad opera   Don Quixote in England (1734)
Burlesque     The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730-1731)
Satires             Pasquin (1736),
                       The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737)

Fielding, as the second but more important novelist of the 18th century, produced four popular novels. They are:
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Adams (1742)
The life of Mr.Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743),
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).
Amelia (1751)

Tom Jones, a Foundling
     The hero of the novel is an illegitimate child called Tom Jones, who is informally adopted by Mr. Allworthy, a country gentleman of great wealth and goodness. Tom is educated with the son of his foster father’s sister, young Blifil. Although Tom delightly spends his innocent childhood, as the result partly of his own misconduct but more by the malice and treachery of Blifil, he is cast off by Mr. Allworthy, and sets out from home with no definite purpose, and meets with many adventures on the roads of western England. Before his departure, he and Sophia Western, the only daughter of a neighboring squire, fall in love with each other. After Tom’s leaving, Sophia is urged to marry Blifil by her father against her will and flees from home with her maid, Mrs. Honour to London. Then follows a complicated series of adventures in which most of the characters of the story are involved, and which constitute the main parts of the novel. Though Tom honestly tries to live righteously and to rescue Sophia from the clutches of her enemies, not only the despicable Lady Bellaston and a nobleman who wishes to marry her, but her aunt and her father, he is involved in some immoral affairs and misfortunes. He is arrested on the charge of murdering a man in a street quarrel. Partly through the efforts of various persons whom he has befriended and partly by the discovery of Blifil’s unspeakable villainy, Tom is released. At last, Jones is proved to be the son of Mr. Allworthy’s sister’s and receives the forgiveness from Sophia. Tom and Sophia are happily married, while the villain Blifil is punished.
     In this novel, Fielding shows the real life of his contemporary men in a matter-of-fact way. He reveals the hypocritical and degenerated ruling class and portrays the poor laborer. Tom Jones just paints such a full and true picture of the life in 18th century in England. Here, Fielding eulogizes simple people with their natural morality.

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