The Works of Henry Fielding

The Works of Henry Fielding is a collected edition of the writings of Henry Fielding, the eighteenth century English novelist, playwright, journalist, and magistrate who lived from 1707 to 1754. Various collected editions of Fielding’s work appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gathering together the substantial body of writing he produced across his roughly thirty year literary career.

The collected works typically run to many volumes and cover the full range of Fielding’s writing. The novels are the central material. Joseph Andrews of 1742 and Tom Jones of 1749 are the two great comic novels on which much of his lasting reputation rests, both of them substantial works of substantial length. Amelia of 1751 is the more sober and morally serious last novel. The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great of 1743 is the shorter satirical novel about the famous London criminal.

The earlier dramatic work fills several volumes of the collected editions. Fielding had been a successful and prolific playwright during the years from 1728 to 1737, when the Licensing Act effectively ended his theatrical career and pushed him toward the novels for which he is now better known. The plays include comedies, burlesques, ballad operas, and various satirical pieces, several of which were major commercial successes in their time but which are now largely forgotten outside specialist scholarship.

The journalism is the third major component. Fielding edited several periodicals across his career, including The Champion in the early 1740s and The Covent Garden Journal in 1752. The collected works typically include substantial selections from these papers, where Fielding’s voice as a public commentator on the political and social questions of his time can be heard most directly.

There are also various miscellaneous works including poems, occasional essays, legal pamphlets from his magistrate’s years, and the various shorter pieces that did not fit naturally into any of the other categories. The cumulative effect of working through a collected edition is to see the full range of Fielding’s literary career and to understand how the various activities reinforced each other across his working life. The edition pairs naturally with the individual novels and with the substantial body of Fielding scholarship.