Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The Georgian Group in February 2022.
Typical of British society before the revolution in America, a society that spanned the Atlantic and whose authors were read on both its sides, the novels of Henry Fielding are part of the American literary heritage. They underline its variety, a variety that includes differing forms of American nativism but also Americans who lived and worked abroad, just as, for example, Benjamin West was an American painter.
Fielding (1707–54) came from a distinguished background, his father having a successful army career and his mother being the daughter of a judge. He went to Eton and then to Leiden University, but the death of his mother, and his father’s subsequent remarriage, disrupted the family. His first works appeared in 1728, and initially Fielding wrote for the stage and trained as a lawyer, but he made his name as a novelist, notably with Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), picaresque tales of innocents comically navigating the turmoil of social assumptions. Fielding insisted that his novels were “true histories” in that they revealed the truth of behavior, an approach especially suited to the ironic voice he adopted as narrator, a voice that gave his novels a distinctive character.
Fielding insisted that his novels were “true histories” in that they revealed the truth of behavior.
Their film versions present a misleading impression of his oeuvre as a
