Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding was a playwright whose satires on Walpole provoked the Licensing Act of 1737 that closed the theatres to him, so he turned to law and then, in answer to Richardson’s Pamela, to the novel. Joseph Andrews began as a parody and became something better; Tom Jones, the story of a foundling’s road to London and his inheritance, is the most perfectly plotted comic novel in English, with a narrator who never stops talking to the reader. As magistrate for Westminster he founded the Bow Street Runners, London’s first police. He died in Lisbon at forty-seven, seeking a cure.