Talk:Henry Fielding

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 * I removed the Law enforcement tag because this article appears to have nothing to do with law enforcement. EMT1871 09:32, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
 * You're right, the article has little to do with law enforcement, but it should have more. Besides being a novelist, Fielding was a magistrate who started the Bow Street Runners, typically considered the first stab at modern policing and the precursor to the London Metropolitan Police. His book on Jonathan Wild is also important in police history because it was a powerful critique of thief-takers that still echoes today in framing the issue of police corruption. He wrote various treatise on policing, but the Wild book became very popular and helped shape the thinking that policing is something best done by a public body, preparing the way for Robert Peel. In comparison, Americans did adopt and adapt the London city police model, but the private detective industry, a la Pinkertons, performed a lot of what we now consider police work well into the 20th century. Oh yeah, and his brother, John Fielding, picked up where Henry left off and developed the police model further, with innovations like mounted police. I'll try and add some of this into the article when I get a chance. Cheers, Bobanny 10:10, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Bow Street Runners
H.Fielding is covered in every class I've ever taken regarding the history of law enforcement and policing. The Bow Street Runners is a very significant group; Fielding is likewise noted for forming the BSR, and this article is severely lacking without mentioning such. I'll try to get some references and author a section soon. /Blaxthos 13:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Literary Style
I have inserted a section on Fielding's literary style which I feel needs to be included in this article on such a prominent author in British Literature.Ivankinsman 07:21, 19 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The mentioning of 'psychological realism' is utterly anacronistic when related to 18th century literature. Any 'psychology', in the modern sense of the word, attached to fiction from that or earlier (of the major part of the following) century is retrospect. It's also a little far fetched to indicate that the use of memoirs or letters by other contemporary authors is an attempt at realism. The 'documentary' style of Richardson, for instance, might as well be seen as a play with literary methods. Actually, the play with 'documentarism' might be seen as a major literary vehichle from the Renaissance and well into to 19th century. This was highlighted by Sterne a few years later. While, on the other side: If you read 'Tom Jones', you'll find that Fielding repeatedly defends 'realism' in literature, as opposed to what he finds in most novels. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.212.42.108 (talk) 21:36, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
 * That's rather silly. Psychology, even if undefined, still existed. Its the operation of the human mind, and philosophy served as the basis for a lot of psychological principles later. Even though the term may not what he would have used, the concept was. Ottava Rima (talk) 21:53, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

The discussion of Fielding's style is lopsided - it doesn't deal with whatever there is about his work that has made people love it so (for a long time). No discussion of Tom Jones is complete if it doesn't recognize that the book is very (very) funny.

Family tree
Partial family tree shown below, copied from Talk:Sarah Fielding:

See Sarah Fielding for more details. Carcharoth 10:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Copyright problem
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Link for Henry Fielding's relative shows Sarah Banerji
Please correct the link that shows Sarah Banerji as Henry Fielding's relative. 122.161.251.238 (talk) 21:11, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Flakiness of reference sources
To inform the life-story of one of Britain’s greatest authors, it is astonishing to be relying on several footnoted sources that carry no visible credibility and/or are written by people for whom English must clearly be a second language (Eng Lit is not short of qualified first-language critics and biographers). The following five sources of "fact" and opinion currently being cited should either be junked or investigated as to their scholarly value:

"Henry Fielding". People. The Dorset Page. – An unsigned guide to the county of Dorset which documents the lives of some of its people. The overtly amateur website has no About page and gives no attribution to its writer/s by name. Why should anybody accept that it has any credible authority?

Liukkonen, Petri. "Henry Fielding". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. – A book by a Finnish writer (borrowed?) from a public library, the link to which is broken.

Castro-Santana, Anaclara (2015-08-18). "Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews". English Studies. – A student essay published on an online open-source platform which, again, offers no credentials to support its activities as a “publisher” or to guarantee any rigour in vetting submissions. It declares itself to be “operating in the Knowledge and Information Economy”. Oh yes, so do let’s trust this outfit!

"Henry Fielding". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 2009-09-09 – The link is dead therefore delete.

"Words, Words, Words", From the Beginnings to the 18th Century, La Spiga languages, 2003. – An Italian publisher of school textbooks!!! No author declared.

CONCLUSION – It would be far safer to substitute for all of these dubious sources the standard British work of reference, already being cited elsewhere: Drabble, Margaret, ed. (1985). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press. pp. 347–48. == == 217.155.200.241 (talk) 23:46, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Liberal views? Typo or not?
The following sentence from the "Dramatist and novelist" section implies Fielding had liberal views: "Fielding continued to air his liberal and anti-Jacobite views in satirical articles and newspapers in the late 1730s and early 1740s."

Other content of the article suggests he may have been anti-liberal, by being a Tory, and satirising prominent Whigs. Initially I thought there may have been a missing word, but I cannot find any direct evidence to support that. Minor variations of this sentence appear in many other places online, all apparently copied from the same source. Can someone who knows more about Fielding's view please clarify whether Fielding was liberal, anti-liberal, or whether those terms are even appropriate to describe him? Apart form that sentence, I would have thought Fielding was a conservative satirist, but the article does not clarify either way. Salpynx (talk) 20:19, 31 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Fielding's politics become intelligible when considered in their context. The Tory leader Bolingbroke founded the Craftsman to campaign against the Whig Prime Minister, Walpole. Bolingbroke used Whig arguments to criticise the practice of Walpole's Whig government e.g. the first Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis demanded frequent elections whilst the Whig government had passed an Act of Parliament extending parliament's life from three to seven years. The first Whigs had argued for elections free from bribery and corruption, whereas Walpole's use of corruption was notorious. After Lord Cobham set up a Whig opposition to Walpole, George Lyttelton and William Pitt joined him (Lyttelton and Pitt were also Fielding's friends from Eton). These 'Cobhamites' (or 'Boy Patriots' as they also called) voted with Tories in Parliament against Walpole. Fielding wrote articles expressing the opposition Whig point of view in Bolingbroke's newspaper the Craftsman but he remained a Whig. In the 1740s he became the leading propagandist for the government of Henry Pelham, who carried on the 'Court Whig' tradition of Walpole.Britannicus (talk) 19:40, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

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Picture caption
Should this caption "Henry Fielding, about 1743, etching by Jonathan Wild" read instead "etching from "Jonathan Wild""? Or did the subject of his book actually do the etching?Ealtram (talk) 05:25, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ Chariotsacha (talk) 17:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Incest
It seems odd that there is no mention of the rumour of incest with one of his sisters, as this is widely reported, even discussed by Melvin Bragg on BBC radio 4's In Our Time. Especially as it has been said "Potential incest is a re-occuring theme within the book" 109.144.20.131 (talk) 01:21, 18 June 2024 (UTC)