Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English novelist, playwright and magistrate, born in Somerset to a family of impoverished gentry and educated at Eton. In his twenties he was London's most successful comic dramatist, until his political satires provoked the Licensing Act of 1737 and closed his theater. He turned to law and to fiction, parodying Richardson's Pamela in Shamela and Joseph Andrews, then publishing Tom Jones (1749), the novel that fixed the form of English comic realism, and Amelia. As a magistrate for Westminster he helped found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police. He sailed to Lisbon for his health and died there at forty-seven.