Henry Fielding
Fielding, Henry (English author, 1707-1754)
Biography:
Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), author and magistrate, was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, the eldest of the seven children of Colonel Edmund Fielding (1680–1741), a veteran of Marlborough's wars who would rise to the rank of lieutenant-general, and Sarah Gould (bap. 1682, d. 1718), daughter of Sir Henry Gould (1643/4–1710), judge of the king's bench, and his wife, Sarah (c.1654–1733), daughter of Richard Davidge, a wealthy London merchant with property in the west country, whose estate at Sharpham she inherited. On his father's side Fielding was related to the earls of Denbigh and Desmond who, by means of certain papers forged by Basil Fielding (c.1608–1675), the second earl of Denbigh, claimed descent from the Habsburgs of Germany—a connection that enabled Fielding to use as his seal the imperial eagle of Austria. His grandfather the eminent latitudinarian divine Dr John Fielding (c.1650–1698), prebendary of Salisbury and archdeacon of Dorset, was first to establish the family in the west country; and through John's brother William, third earl (1640–1685), Fielding was second cousin to the earl's granddaughter, the bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who remained his friend and counsellor. On his mother's side his uncle Davidge Gould (c.1684–1765), who inherited Sharpham on Sir Henry's death, was himself a prominent lawyer of the Middle Temple and would in due course expedite Fielding's admission to the bar.
Although Sarah married Edmund against her parents' wishes, Sir Henry, a month before Fielding was born, drew up a new will leaving £3000 towards the purchase of an estate for ‘the sole and separate use’ of his daughter and her children, Edmund being explicitly excluded from the arrangement (Battestin and Battestin, Life, 12); in the event, the cost of the handsome farm which, shortly before his death in the spring of 1710, Sir Henry acquired for Sarah at East Stour, Dorset, was £4750, more than half again the sum provided for. The family, which by then included Fielding's sisters Catharine (1708–1750) and Ursula (1709–1750), were soon settled at East Stour. There Sarah gave birth to four more children: Sarah Fielding (1710–1768), the novelist and translator of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, Anne (1713–1716), who died in infancy, Beatrice (1714–1751), and Edmund (b. 1716, d. after 1755), who would follow his father into the army. After their mother's death in April 1718 the property was held in trust for Fielding and his siblings until, after Edmund came of age, they sold it in 1739. None of the sisters married, and only Sarah, Fielding's favourite, outlived him; the others, who were living together at Turnham Green, Middlesex, died within a few months of each other in 1750–51 and were buried at St Paul's, Hammersmith.
Early years and Eton, 1718–1726
His duties as colonel of a regiment, and his penchant for the expensive pleasures of London, meant that Fielding's father was, as one of his creditors complained, ‘frequently from home’, leaving his sons and the girls to be raised by their mother and the female servants of the household (Battestin and Battestin, Life, 16). Fielding may have learned a measure of discipline from the neighbouring curate, John Oliver, who visited the farm two or three times a week to teach him Latin: a man he seems to have remembered in the good clergyman who serves as his spokesman in Shamela (1741). But as a boy he was, in his father's words, ‘headstrong and undutiful’ (ibid., 33); and this behaviour grew worse when, soon after his mother died in April 1718, a week before his eleventh birthday, Edmund left the family in the care of Lady Gould's sister, Mrs Cottington, and went to London to court a new wife: Anne Rapha, a widow and a Roman Catholic with children of her own. In autumn of the following year Colonel Fielding sent his son to Eton College and committed the girls and his infant son to the care of their grandmother in Salisbury; a year later, having suffered financially in the crash of the South Sea stocks, he sold a large part of the farm at East Stour, which was his children's inheritance. Incensed at the insult to her daughter's memory and concerned that their stepmother would raise the children as papists, Lady Gould brought an action against Edmund in chancery to establish her right to custody of the children and the children's right to what was left of the farm. The records of this case, in which servants and relatives on both sides testified, provide a vivid and at times disturbing impression of the enmity that poisoned the atmosphere in the household at this time, exacerbating the boy's frowardness. In May 1722 the lord chancellor gave judgment against Fielding's father on every count: Edmund lost all rights to the East Stour farm; the girls were to continue at Mary Rookes's boarding-school at Salisbury, and Fielding was to continue at Eton, spending his holidays with Lady Gould.
Fielding remembered Eton chiefly for the blood he sacrificed there at Learning's ‘birchen Altar’, as he put it in Tom Jones (bk 13, chap. 1). The discipline he received, and may be thought to have needed, was probably the cause of his running away from school in the spring of 1721 to the solace of his grandmother at Salisbury. According to Horace Walpole, when he returned to school on this or another occasion the excuse he gave for neglecting his lessons was ‘that he had been writing a Comedy, in which he had drawn the characters of his Father and Family’—a tantalizing piece of juvenilia now lost (Battestin and Battestin, Life, 36). Despite such delinquencies Eton provided Fielding with a sound education in the classical languages and literature, and it encouraged in him an appetite for learning that informed his writing. And there, too, he began important friendships with George Lyttelton, William Pitt, and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams among others.
By the time he finished at Eton in 1724 Fielding's essential character and physical appearance as remarked by his contemporaries had been formed. He was, as Arthur Murphy, his first biographer, recalled, tall in stature (‘rising above six feet’) and powerfully built (Murphy, 47). As his friend James Harris remembered him—and as the picture of him by Hogarth and another attributed to Reynolds confirm—he was ‘not handsome’ (Battestin and Battestin, Life, 48): he was himself given to joking about his length of nose and chin. There was about him, however, a vivacity of manner, a personal magnetism that his friends found attractive. What struck Harris in particular were the eyes, ‘peculiarly penetrating and quick’, that enlivened Fielding's aspect ‘during the Sallies of Wit and anger’ (Harris, 305). By nature he was a sociable man and his conversation dazzled: Lyttelton, who knew them all, declared to James Beattie that Fielding ‘had more wit and humour’ than Swift, Pope, and the other wits of his time put together (Beattie, 571n.). Harris emphasized as well Fielding's passionate temperament: ‘his Passions’ were ‘vehement in every kind’ (Harris, 306). His appetites—for sex, for good food and drink, for snuff—were strong and he indulged them. Yet he was no boor: he could lead a minuet in the assembly room at Bath, and he enjoyed the music of Handel. Indeed, he set forth at length in his ‘Essay on conversation’ a definition of what constitutes good breeding in social intercourse that strikes one today as sounder than the polite maxims of Lord Chesterfield.
There was, however, nothing obviously polite about a romantic episode of these early years. For some months in the late summer and autumn of 1725 Fielding was at Lyme Regis, Dorset, pursuing a pretty heiress, his cousin Sarah Andrew, a girl of fifteen who was the ward of her uncle Andrew Tucker. The court rolls of Lyme record Fielding's threatening to thrash Sarah's guardian who, it appears, had intervened to prevent his abducting the girl on her way to church. Before he fled the town on 15 November, Fielding posted a notice declaring ‘to all the World’ that Tucker and his son were ‘Clowns, and Cowards’ (Battestin and Battestin, Life, 51).
Theatre, marriage, and the Middle Temple, 1727–1739
Fielding, who took pride in printing ‘esq.’ after his name on title-pages, had expectations of living like a gentleman. Nobility were his near relatives and by 1727 his father had risen to the rank of brigadier-general. But in eight years of marriage to his second wife, who died that year, Edmund had fathered six more children, all sons (among them Fielding's favourite, John, who was blinded at the age of nineteen by the incompetence of a surgeon); and when the demands of living in a style suited to his rank were added to his inveterate prodigality and the expense of maintaining a large family, there was little left for his eldest son and heir. Murphy states that Fielding was promised an allowance of £200 a year, which Fielding quipped, ‘any body might pay that would’ (Murphy, 10). He would have to choose, he told Lady Mary, between being ‘a Hackney Writer or a Hackney Coachman’ (Complete Letters, 3.66). He had to write for a living, and he began by writing poems and plays.
Fielding's first published work, a pair of poems on the occasions of George II's coronation and birthday, appeared together in November 1727; they are known today only through the booksellers' advertisements. The Masquerade, a verse satire in hudibrastics, was published in January 1728 and is his earliest extant work. In February, Fielding's career as dramatist began auspiciously enough when, as an unknown author in his twentieth year, his first play, the comedy Love in Several Masques, was staged by Cibber at Drury Lane—an extraordinary favour due probably to the influence of Lady Mary, to whom Fielding dedicated the published version. Competing for audiences with Gay's Beggar's Opera, which was enjoying its highly successful first run at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Fielding's comedy sank without a trace after four nights. In March 1728 he left England for some months to study literature at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to see something of Europe. When he returned to London in January 1730 he had to carry his next play, The Temple Beau, to Goodman's Fields, a new playhouse with a much inferior company of actors located in the City.
The comedy was nevertheless well received; Fielding's career as dramatist had begun in earnest. His proper element as a playwright, however, was not the five-act comedy but the ‘irregular’ modes of farce and satire and ballad opera that allowed him licence to experiment with forms and to exploit his talent as a songwriter. In March 1730 at the Little Haymarket Theatre he had his first popular success with The Author's Farce; its third act, entitled ‘The Pleasures of the Town’, was played by actors who impersonated puppets representing well-known personalities of the day. To this a month later he added as an afterpiece Tom Thumb: a Tragedy, a burlesque of heroic drama which, the following year, he improved and expanded as The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. These and other ‘irregular’ plays yet to come he published under the pseudonym Scriblerus Secundus, declaring his literary kinship with the club of wits founded by Swift, Pope, and Gay. Over the next six years Fielding was, as R. D. Hume observes, ‘the most dominant professional playwright in London since Dryden’ (Hume, ix). Of the eight ‘regular’ comedies in which he meant to match the masters he most admired—Jonson and Molière, Congreve and Farquhar—the best are Rape upon Rape, or, The Justice Caught in his Own Trap (1730) (later renamed The Coffee-House Politician), and The Modern Husband (1732). Both plays are experiments in a kind of ‘heroic’ comedy which anticipates Shaw in the treatment of serious social themes. The Miser (1733), a lively adaptation of Molière's L'Avare, was by far Fielding's most successful play in this classic form; it held the stage for years to come. In the ‘irregular’ dramatic forms he was often reckless in his choice of subject. In June 1731 The Grub-Street Opera, which ridiculed the royal family and the leaders of both political parties, was withdrawn at the Haymarket before it opened, almost certainly because of threats from the government. So high, however, was Fielding's reputation by this time that when he resumed writing for the stage six months later it was for Cibber again at Drury Lane. He remained there as house playwright for two lucrative years, producing in that time nine new plays as well as a revised version of The Author's Farce.
Fielding in his political relations during this period has been considered strictly an opposition writer who targeted the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. Published either anonymously or pseudonymously in the anti-ministerial papers Mist's (later Fog's) Weekly Journal and The Craftsman in 1728 and 1730, a few incidental pieces ridiculing Walpole have been cogently attributed to Fielding; but except for The Grub-Street Opera there is little political content in Fielding's other productions of this time. And it is clear that under the influence of Lady Mary, who was Walpole's friend, Fielding sought the prime minister's patronage: in 1729–30 he wrote an unfinished burlesque of Pope's Dunciad satirizing the minister's enemies; and in 1732 he dedicated the published version of The Modern Husband to Walpole in a fulsome manner. That overture elicited from the anti-ministerial authors of the Grub-Street Journal an abusive series of personal attacks on Fielding—attacks which were answered in turn by his friends, the ministerial writers James Ralph in the Weekly Register and Thomas Cooke in The Comedian. Fielding's association with Ralph and Cooke, both of whom were freethinkers in religion, squares as well with his own flirtation with deism at this time, an attitude apparent in Pasquin (1736) in the characterization of Firebrand, the hypocritical priest who murders Common Sense. By the time he began writing The Champion at the end of the decade, however, Fielding's disillusionment with deism was complete and is clearly apparent in Joseph Andrews (1742, bk 3, chap. 3), where Wilson repudiates the ‘Rule of Right-men’ whose heterodox notions resemble those of Ralph and Cooke.
In January 1734 a dispute between actors and management ended Fielding's profitable association with Drury Lane. On the eve of the general election he took Don Quixote in England to the Haymarket, dedicating the published version to Chesterfield, leader of the opposition party which now included Fielding's friend and patron Lyttelton, with whose political interests, whether in or out of power, he usually identified from this time forward. From March 1734 to September 1739 he promoted those interests in essays published anonymously in The Craftsman and less often in Common Sense, the other principal journal of the opposition.
On 28 November 1734, at Charlcombe near Bath, Fielding married Charlotte Cradock (d. 1744) of Salisbury, ‘one’, he later declared in the ‘Preface’ to the Miscellanies (1743), ‘from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life’. According to Murphy, she brought Fielding a dowry of £1500. In the ten years of their union she bore five children: Charlotte (1736–1742), Penelope (d. 1740), Catharine (d. 1743), Henry (1741–1750), and Henrietta Eleanor, called Harriet (1743–1766). Charlotte died in November 1744; her ‘Idea’ is preserved in the heroines of Fielding's novels, Sophia Western (Fielding, Tom Jones, bk 4, chap. 2) and Amelia Booth.
For two seasons in 1736 and 1737 Fielding managed and wrote for his own company of comedians at the Haymarket. In Pasquin and The Historical Register, two of his most successful plays, he emulated the ‘old comedy’ of Aristophanes in satires of a markedly personal and topical cast, ridiculing the follies of the town and targeting in particular the corruption and incompetence of Walpole's ministry. His popularity at this time was such that he was entertaining thoughts of building his own theatre when Walpole acted to silence him. In June 1737 parliament passed the Theatrical Licensing Act, which limited theatrical performances to Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Royal Opera House, and imposed censorship of the stage. His career as dramatist at an end, Fielding in November 1737 entered the Middle Temple to begin preparing for the bar, to which he was admitted in June 1740.
Politics, Joseph Andrews, and Miscellanies, 1739–1743
Fielding continued his clandestine association with The Craftsman—and under the name Mum Budget published in Common Sense (13 May 1738) an arch essay recommending the wisdom of keeping silent in Walpole's England. As far as the public was aware, however, he had published nothing for two and a half years when, in November 1739, he reappeared as Capt. Hercules Vinegar, author of The Champion. This periodical, in which he was assisted by Ralph, mixed humour with moral, social, and, most particularly, with political commentary promoting the opposition's campaign against Walpole; his active involvement with the journal ceased about December 1740. A clear sign of his financial distress during these months, when he was being hounded in the courts by creditors, is his willingness to undertake for his bookseller John Nourse the onerous task of translating the voluminous Military History of Charles XII, King of Sweden from Gustaf Adlerfelt's French original—a labour of ten months before the work was published in October 1740. This was followed in January 1741 by a trio of publications: namely, Of True Greatness, a verse epistle dedicated to his patron George Bubb Dodington on a favourite motif of Fielding's moral thought; the Vernoniad, a mock-heroic satire of Walpole's ineffectual prosecution of the war with Spain after Admiral Vernon's early victory at Porto Bello; and the initial numbers of the History of Our Own Times, a short-lived magazine attributed to Fielding in collaboration with his friend the Revd William Young, an accomplished classical scholar who would serve as the model for Fielding's most memorable character, Parson Abraham Adams. The magazine ended in March when Fielding was for a fortnight confined for debt in a bailiff's sponging house; he was freed on securities posted by his peruke maker and his sister Catharine, who had recently inherited the estate of her godmother, Mrs Cottington. There would be, however, no help from his father. In November 1740 Edmund Fielding, now a lieutenant-general, had been himself committed for debt to the Fleet prison where, in March 1741 as his son fretted in confinement, he married his fourth wife, a woman said to be his servant. If, as is likely, Fielding is the author of the anti-ministerial pamphlet The Crisis: a Sermon published in April, a bitter passage in that work denouncing the irresponsibility of fathers who squander their patrimony and entail beggary on their children attests to his anger at what he considered Edmund's unconscionable self-indulgence. In June, aged sixty-one, General Fielding died at his lodgings in the rules of the prison.
One production of this troubled season marked the first step towards a new literary career which would bring Fielding lasting fame: this was An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, published on 2 April 1741, a hilarious parody of the epistolary form and naïve moralism of Samuel Richardson's popular first novel, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded. Fielding's little book, the first of a spate of so-called ‘anti-Pamelas’, was well received among sophisticated readers; and it gave him the idea of building on Richardson's novel in a more ambitious and constructive way. In the autumn he fleshed out an alternative conception of the art of fiction: ‘Written’, as the title-page declares, ‘in Imitation of The Manner of CERVANTES, Author of Don Quixote’, Joseph Andrews is the first comic novel in English—a new species of writing that Fielding in his ‘Preface’ called ‘a comic Epic-Poem in Prose’.
The latter part of 1741 was also remarkable for a surprising change of direction in Fielding's political writing. As it became apparent in this election year that Walpole's long tenure as prime minister was coming to an end, the ‘patriots’ of the opposition, notably Pulteney in the Commons and Carteret in the Lords, began scrambling for places; at a time when Fielding was desperately in need of money, the friends whose cause he had supported for more than seven years saw less need of his services. After April 1741 he not only wrote nothing on their behalf, but in The Opposition: a Vision (December) portrayed them as self-serving hypocrites while representing the prime minister as the wise and genial leader of the nation. Walpole, whose money Fielding in The Champion (4 October 1740) had admitted taking in exchange for suppressing a book (perhaps an ur-version of Jonathan Wild), and who answered generously his call for subscribers to the Miscellanies in the winter of 1741–2, appears to have been his benefactor at this time. These were also the months when he successfully courted two of the most important patrons of his life: James Harris of Salisbury, with whom he initiated a rare personal correspondence in September 1741, and Ralph Allen of Bath, at whose house a month or so later he was entertained in the company of Pope and Warburton.
On 22 February 1742 Fielding's long association with his friend the Scots bookseller Andrew Millar began with the publication of Joseph Andrews. In April he formally assigned to Millar, for the generous payment of £199 6s., the copyright to the novel, and to two other minor works: namely, A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough, a pamphlet defending the character of the widow of his hero, victor of the War of the Spanish Succession; and Miss Lucy in Town, a farce in which he may have collaborated with David Garrick in the actor's brilliant first season at Drury Lane. From this time forward Millar, whom Samuel Johnson credited with having ‘raised the price of literature’, would publish most of Fielding's major works.
In February, too, Walpole's twenty-one-year tenure as prime minister came to an end, and he was elevated to the House of Lords as earl of Orford. His former adversaries now dropped the mask of selfless patriotism and followed him there, Pulteney as earl of Bath, Lord Carteret with the augmented title of Earl Granville. Fielding expressed his contempt for their hypocrisy in a number of passages inserted that year in Joseph Andrews (bk 2, chap. 10), in the translation of Aristophanes' Plutus, the God of Riches (act 2, scene 5, n.) written in collaboration with William Young, and in several pieces he was preparing for the Miscellanies, notably in A Journey from this World to the Next (bk 1, chaps. 3, 7, 23) and Jonathan Wild (bk 2, chap. 12). That novel, an ironic celebration of ‘greatness’ as the distinguishing characteristic of its eponymous hero, may have begun as a satire of Walpole, the most notorious ‘great man’ of his time, whom opposition writers had figured as Wild; but in revision Fielding was at pains to generalize his theme. Indeed, at the end of his life his opinion of Walpole was wholly favourable: in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (18 July) he is ‘one of the best of men and of ministers’.
The Miscellanies, published in three volumes in April 1743, included two works already published that year: Some papers proper to be read before the R[oya]l Society, concerning the terrestrial chrysipus, golden-foot or guinea, a satire of the miser Peter Walter written in parody of the Philosophical Transactions, and The Wedding-Day, a comedy drafted by Fielding at the beginning of his career but first acted in February 1743 at Drury Lane with Garrick in the role of Millamour. Volume 1 of the collection comprises most, but not all, of Fielding's poetry, including the verse epistles ‘Of True Greatness’, addressed to Dodington; ‘Of Good-Nature’, a concept fundamental to Fielding's moral thought, addressed to the duke of Richmond; ‘Of Liberty’, addressed to Lyttelton; and a burlesque version of Juvenal's misogynistic Sixth Satire that, Fielding assured his readers, ‘was originally sketched out before I was Twenty, and was all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover’. Among the prose pieces included in the volume are the essays ‘On conversation’, ‘On the knowledge of the characters of men’, and ‘Of the remedy of affliction for the loss of our friends’, a Christian stoic consolatio written at his daughter's death in March 1742. The 427 subscribers whose names appear at the head of the volume—others such as Allen and Pope subscribed anonymously—brought Fielding, before expenses, more than 770 guineas, ‘a pleasant sum’, as H. K. Miller remarked in his edition, ‘and one that satisfied Fielding's most “urgent Motive” in publishing’ the work (p. xlvii).
The law, second marriage, and Tom Jones, 1743–1749
The rest of that year and most of the next Fielding published nothing but a preface to the second edition of his sister Sarah's first novel, The Adventures of David Simple. He continued to ride the western circuit in hopes of finding clients for his law practice, but he had little business: his name appears in the records of courts and assizes for the years 1743–7 (though these are incomplete) on just seven ‘declarations of ejectment’ pertaining to estates in the counties of Berkshire, Devon, Somerset, Hampshire, and Northamptonshire. These months are chiefly notable for the deepening of his friendship with James Harris, to whom he addressed letters from places such as Brompton, near Knightsbridge, and Twerton, near Bath—places where he hoped Charlotte might recover her failing health. Harris helped him with what Fielding knew to be his ‘lame’ translation of Demosthenes' First Olynthiac (in the Miscellanies), dedicated to him a facetious History of Nobody, and offered his condolences when Charlotte died, possibly from consumption, in November 1744. Fielding buried her beside her mother and daughter in the chancel vault of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London. Replying to Harris's letter on the occasion, Fielding called him ‘the Man whom I esteem most of any person in this World’ (Correspondence, 42).
There are good reasons why Fielding published so little during this period. In February 1745 he announced in the papers the imminent publication of a treatise in two volumes on crown law, entitled ‘An institute of the pleas of the crown’—a work based, it was rumoured, on the manuscript notes of his grandfather Sir Henry Gould. The announcement was, to say the least, optimistic as the treatise was never published. It may have served a purpose, however, by boosting Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's confidence in his legal acumen: in June Hanbury Williams employed Fielding to defend him in a suit brought by the directors of the Italian Opera against the subscribers.
About this time Fielding, at the instance of Lyttelton, began composing his masterpiece Tom Jones, originally entitled ‘The Foundling’. More urgent matters, however, soon interrupted him. The Jacobite rising, which broke out in Scotland in the summer of 1745, prompted Fielding's friends in the government—which now included Lyttelton, Dodington, and Chesterfield, and would soon also include Pitt—to enlist his help in representing to the nation the gravity of the threat the rebels posed. In October he published within a fortnight three anti-Jacobitical pamphlets: namely, A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain, The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland, and A Dialogue between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender. On 5 November he began publishing with the same purpose the True Patriot, a weekly periodical he continued until 17 June 1746, by which time, the rebels having been defeated at Culloden on 16 April, the danger to the nation had passed. April also proved a propitious month for Fielding personally as it marked the beginning of his association with his most powerful patron, the duke of Bedford, first lord of the Admiralty and later secretary of state for the southern department in the Pelham ministry. Bedford, who was warden, appointed Fielding high steward of the New forest, a royal preserve; he retained this office—which, though modest, was the most distinguished he held as a lawyer—until December 1748 when, on his appointment to the Middlesex magistracy, Bedford required him to resign the patent.
In the summer of 1746 Fielding remained in town for some weeks. In August he answered the complaint of the directors of the Italian Opera against Hanbury Williams, and witnessed the execution of the Jacobite lords at the Tower. When he resumed work on Tom Jones he made the 'Forty-Five an integral part of the plot, altering the time scheme of the narrative so that Jones might demonstrate his loyalty to the Hanoverian establishment by joining a troop of the king's soldiers marching against the rebels.
In September Fielding was at Bath when news broke of a sensational scandal at Glastonbury. Posing as a physician, one Mary Hamilton, a lesbian and transvestite, duped a young woman into marrying her and successfully carried off the deception for two months. When he returned to town Fielding published in November, anonymously, The Female Husband, a fictive account of the affair. In February of the following year he followed this tale of unnatural sexuality by publishing, again anonymously, a prose paraphrase of Ovid's Art of Love, ‘Adapted’, as the title-page promises, ‘to the Present Time’. Fielding's uncharacteristically explicit preoccupation with erotic subjects during these winter months is puzzling, and perhaps a reflection of an embarrassing domestic situation then developing at Old Boswell Court, the comfortable house near the inns of court in which, since Charlotte's death, he and the children had been looked after by his sister Sarah and the cookmaid Mary Daniel. By now Fielding's sexual relationship with Mary may have begun; in May, certainly, she was pregnant with his child. Sarah meanwhile was finishing her second novel, this time preferring Richardson's epistolary form to her brother's narrative method. In April she published Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, to which Fielding contributed the preface and five of the letters (letters XL–XLIV).
In June 1747 Fielding resumed his service as publicist for the ministry. As Pelham surprised the opposition by declaring a general election a year early, Fielding, supporting the ministry, published A dialogue between a gentleman of London, agent for two court candidates, and an honest alderman of the country party. In December, under the ironic persona of John Trott-Plaid, he began another periodical, the Jacobite's Journal, ridiculing the tory opposition as adherents of the Pretender; he continued publishing the paper every Saturday until 5 November 1748. In the literary department called ‘The court of criticism’ he reviewed favourably his friend Edward Moore's comedy The Foundling (19 March 1748), James Thomson's Castle of Indolence (4 June), and, of particular interest, Richardson's Clarissa. When the instalments of his rival's masterpiece appeared in December 1747 and April 1748 Fielding warmly recommended the novel in the Journal (2 January and 5 March); and after reading with admiration a pre-publication copy of the fifth volume, with its moving account of the rape, he praised Richardson's achievement still more effusively in a famous letter to him of 15 October.
On 27 November 1747 at the City church of St Benet Paul's Wharf, Fielding, with his friend Lyttelton attending, married Mary Daniel (d. 1802) in the sixth month of her pregnancy. About this time, presumably, Sarah left the house to j
