Ten Novels And Their Authors Read Online Free PDF

edition of his works, seems to have known him, if he knew him at all, only in his later years, and had so little material to work with that, presumably to fill the eighty pages of his essay, he indulged in long and tedious digressions. The facts he tells are few, and subsequent research has shown that they are not always accurate. The last author to deal at length with Fielding is Dr Homes Dudden, Master of Pembroke. The two stout volumes of his work are a monument of painstaking industry. By giving a lively picture of the political circumstances of the times, and a vivid account of the Young Pretender’s disastrous adventure in 1745, he has added colour, depth and substance to the narrative of his hero’s checkered career. I don’t believe that there is anything to be said about Henry Fielding that the eminent Master of Pembroke has left unsaid.
    Fielding was a gentleman born. His father was the third son of John Fielding, a Canon of Salisbury, and he in turn was the fifth son of an Earl of Desmond. The Desmonds were a younger branch of the family of Denbigh, who flattered themselves that they were descended from the Habsburgs. Gibbon, the Gibbon of The Decline and Fall , wrote in his autobiography: ‘The successors of Charlesthe Fifth may disclaim their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones , that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escorial, and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.’ The phrase has a fine resonance, and it is a pity that the claim of these noble lords has been shown to have no foundation. They spelt their name Feilding, and there is a well-known story that on one occasion the then Earl asked Henry Fielding how this came about; whereupon he answered: ‘I can only suppose it is because my branch of the family learnt to spell before your lordship’s.’
    Fielding’s father entered the army and served in the wars under Marlborough ‘with much bravery and reputation’. He married Sarah, the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a Judge of the King’s Bench; and at his country seat, Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, our author was born in 1707. Two or three years later the Fieldings, who by this time had had two more children, daughters, moved to East Stour in Dorsetshire, a property which the judge had settled on his daughter, and there three more girls and boy were born. Mrs. Fielding died in 1718, and in the following year Henry went to Eton. Here he made some valuable friends and, if he did not leave, as Arthur Murphy states, ‘uncommonly well versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the Latin classics,’ he certainly acquired a real love for classical learning. Later in life, when he was ill and poverty-stricken, he found comfort in reading Cicero’s De Consolatione ; and when, dying, he set out in the ship that took him to Lisbon, he carried with him a volume of Plato.
    On leaving Eton, instead of going up to a university, he lived for a while at Salisbury with his grandmother, Lady Gould, the judge being dead; and there, according to Dr. Dudden, read some law and a good deal of miscellaneous literature. He was then a handsome youth, over six feet tall, strong and active, with deep-set eyes, a Roman nose, a short upper lip with an ironical curl to it, and astubborn, prominent chin. His hair was brown and curly, his teeth white and even. By the time he was eighteen, he gave promise of the sort of man he was going to be. He happened to be staying at Lyme Regis with a trusty servant, ready to ‘beat, maim or kill’ for his master, and there fell in love with a Miss Sarah Andrews, whose considerable fortune added to the charm of her beauty, and he concocted a scheme to carry her off, by main force if necessary, and marry her. It was discovered, and the young woman was hurried away and safely married to a more eligible suitor. For all one knows to the contrary, Fielding spent the next two or three years in London, with an allowance from his