Henry Fielding – Tom Jones

B Personal Life

Like Tom Jones, it was some time before Fielding learned the virtue of prudence. His early and middle years were marked by “the Rabelaisian vigor of his body appetites.”²⁶ Fielding enjoyed many things to excess, including food, drink, tobacco, sex, and gambling, fuelling the gout he suffered in later life. Fielding was a “good-natured Libertine,”²⁷ whose excesses were only partially ameliorated by his 1734 marriage to Charlotte Cradock,²⁸ the love of his life and upon whom Sophia Western was modelled.²⁹

²¹ Battestin, above n 7, 43.

²² Tom Jones, above n 6, 3–6.
²³ Rogers, above n 1, 18. See also Tom Jones, above n 6, 565: “And thou O learning, … where [at Eton] in early youth I have worshipped. To thee at thy birchen altar … I have sacrificed my blood.”
²⁴ Godden, above n 11, 24–25. Sarah’s uncle and joint-trustee, Andrew Tucker, wanted to marry Sarah to his son, John. He had earlier hired two men to beat Fielding in an attempt to discourage his suit. After the attempted elopement, Sarah was sent to live with her other trustee, Mr Rhodes, who married her to his son, Ambrose. See Rogers, above n 1, 20.
²⁵ Rogers, above n 1, 20.
²⁶ Battestin, above n 7, 150.
²⁷ Ibid, 146, quoting the phrase Sophia Western uses to describe Tom Jones in Book 18, chapter 10 (Tom Jones, 805).
²⁸ Charlotte was one of three sisters, whose widowed mother lived in Salisbury near Fielding’s friend, James Harris. Although none of the 20^th and 21^stcentury biographies consulted in the course of researching this paper refer to the fact, several 19^th century publications maintain that Charlotte was a “natural child”, ie illegitimate (see, for example, Lawrence (1855) 68; Scott (1848) 105), it having been suggested that this was one reason that Fielding made the hero of Tom Jones illegitimate. However, the source of this “fact” was none other than Fielding’s archrival, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), who in his Correspondence (published in 1804), asserted: “In his ‘Tom Jones,’ his hero is made a natural child, because his own first wife was such.” Austin Dobson Fielding (Macmillan, London, 1883) ch 3, citing an earlier biography of Fielding by Thomas Keightley, On the Life and Writings of Henry Fielding (1858), says: “ [Keightley] elicited the information that the family, now extinct, was highly respectable, but not of New Sarum’s [Salisbury’s] best society. Richardson, in one of his malevolent outbursts, asserted that the sisters were illegitimate; but, says [Keightley], ‘of this circumstance we have no other proof, and I am able to add that the tradition of Salisbury knows nothing of it.’ .”
²⁹ Rogers, above n 1, 76–77.
Charlotte’s dowry of £1500 did not last long.³⁰ Like his father, Fielding’s improvidence with money was legendary.³¹ Fielding was sued for debt several times, but his natural generosity saw him lend money he could ill afford to friends worse off than himself, while he continued to borrow to support his own needs. In November 1747, three years after Charlotte’s death, Fielding married her maid, Mary Daniel, who was six month’s pregnant. ³² The marriage was a public scandal, ³³ but Fielding had done what young Mr Nightingale did for Nancy, “made [Mary] an honest woman”.³⁴