The Collected Works of Henry Fielding: Edited with a biographical essay by Leslie Stephen

by Leslie Stephen (Editor)

Henry fielding (1707-54) began his writing career as a playwright and before the age of thirty produced a number of comedies, farces and burlesques. His wit was already apparent, and his admirers included Swift who particularly enjoyed his Tom Thumb . His Pasquin, A Dramatick Satire on the Times was in part responsible for the ensuring restrictive censorship of plays with the Licensing Act of 1737. Fielding practised at law, wrote essays and poems, ran a few journals - but remains most famous for his novels. He began Joseph Andrews as a parody of the sentimentalism of Richardson's Pamela , and quickly developed his humourous and satirical style in Tom Jones , Jonathan Wild and Amelia .
Admired by writers and readers alike, Fielding is one of the true founders of the English novel whose influence can be traced into the nineteenth century and the works of Dickens and Thackeray. The novels are illustrated by William Small and there is a typically erudite biographical introduction by Leslie Stephen.

Genres: Classics, Literature

5216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 1985

About the author

Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Leslie Stephen was the primary editor of the Dictionary of National Biography from 1885-1891

Stephen was born at Kensington Gore in London, the brother of James Fitzjames Stephen and son of Sir James Stephen. His family had belonged to the Clapham Sect, the early 19th century group of mainly evangelical Christian social reformers. At his father's house he saw a good deal of the Macaulays, James Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor and Nassau Senior. After studying at Eton College, King's College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (20th wrangler) in 1854 and M.A. in 1857, Stephen remained for several years a fellow and tutor of his college. He recounted some of his experiences in a chapter in his Life of Fawcett as well as in some less formal Sketches from Cambridge: By a Don (1865). These sketches were reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, to the proprietor of which, George Smith, he had been introduced by his brother. It was at Smith's house at Hampstead that Stephen met his first wife, Harriet Marian (1840 – 1875), daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870 – 1945); after her death he married Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846 – 1895), widow of Herbert Duckworth. With her he had four children: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia & Adrian.

In the 1850s, Stephen and his brother James Fitzjames Stephen were invited by Frederick Denison Maurice to lecture at The Working Men's College. Leslie Stephen became a member of the College's governing College Corporation. He died in Kensington.