Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was born at Sharpham Park in Somerset and educated at Eton; he wrote more than two dozen plays for the London stage until the Licensing Act of 1737 closed off that career, then trained as a barrister and turned to fiction, publishing the parody Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). As London's chief magistrate he founded the Bow Street Runners with his half-brother John in 1749. Worn out by gout and dropsy, he sailed for Lisbon in 1754 to recover his health, died there that October, and left an account of the voyage published posthumously as The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755).