Joseph Andrews, vol 1 | Page 3

Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge's death.
He is said to have received his first education under a parson of the
neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary
tradition sees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly
sent to Eton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and
made several valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leaving
school are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for
two years--though there is no reason to doubt it--depends even less
upon any positive documentary evidence. This famous University still
had a great repute as a training school in law, for which profession he
was intended; but the reason why he did not receive the even then far
more usual completion of a public school education by a sojourn at
Oxford or Cambridge may be suspected to be different. It may even
have had something to do with a curious escapade of his about which
not very much is known--an attempt to carry off a pretty heiress of
Lyme, named Sarah Andrew.
Even at Leyden, however, General Fielding seems to have been unable
or unwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less
there than at an English University; and Henry's return to London in
1728-29 is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he
returned to England, his father was good enough to make him an
allowance of L200 nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to

L0 actual. And as practically nothing is known of him for the next six
or seven years, except the fact of his having worked industriously
enough at a large number of not very good plays of the lighter kind,
with a few poems and miscellanies, it is reasonably enough supposed
that he lived by his pen. The only product of this period which has kept
(or indeed which ever received) competent applause is _Tom Thumb,
or the Tragedy of Tragedies_, a following of course of the Rehearsal,
but full of humour and spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic
works were the Mock Doctor and the Miser, adaptations of Moliere's
famous pieces. His undoubted connection with the stage, and the fact of
the contemporary existence of a certain Timothy Fielding, helped
suggestions of less dignified occupations as actor, booth-keeper, and so
forth; but these have long been discredited and indeed disproved.
In or about 1735, when Fielding was twenty-eight, we find him in a
new, a more brilliant and agreeable, but even a more transient phase.
He had married (we do not know when or where) Miss Charlotte
Cradock, one of three sisters who lived at Salisbury (it is to be observed
that Fielding's entire connections, both in life and letters, are with the
Western Counties and London), who were certainly of competent
means, and for whose alleged illegitimacy there is no evidence but an
unsupported fling of that old maid of genius, Richardson. The
descriptions both of Sophia and of Amelia are said to have been taken
from this lady; her good looks and her amiability are as well
established as anything of the kind can be in the absence of
photographs and affidavits; and it is certain that her husband was
passionately attached to her, during their too short married life. His
method, however, of showing his affection smacked in some ways too
much of the foibles which he has attributed to Captain Booth, and of
those which we must suspect Mr Thomas Jones would also have
exhibited, if he had not been adopted as Mr Allworthy's heir, and had
not had Mr Western's fortune to share and look forward to. It is true
that grave breaches have been made by recent criticism in the very
picturesque and circumstantial story told on the subject by Murphy, the
first of Fielding's biographers. This legend was that Fielding, having
succeeded by the death of his mother to a small estate at East Stour,
worth about L200 a year, and having received L1500 in ready money as
his wife's fortune, got through the whole in three years by keeping open

house, with a large retinue in "costly yellow liveries," and so forth. In
details, this story has been simply riddled. His mother had died long
before; he was certainly not away from London three years, or anything
like it; and so forth. At the same time, the best and soberest judges
agree that there is an intrinsic probability, a consensus (if a vague one)
of tradition, and a chain of almost unmistakably personal references in
the novels, which plead for a certain amount of truth, at the bottom of a
much embellished legend. At any rate, if Fielding established himself
in the country, it was not long before he