Henry Fielding and Bath

In the autumn of 1734, the young playwright Henry Fielding was married to Charlotte Cradock in the church of St Mary at Charlcombe, just outside Bath. Charlotte had only recently left her family home in Salisbury, where the couple had first met four years earlier, and taken lodgings in the crowded parish of St James.

Six years later, fresh from the Western Circuit assizes, Fielding travelled from Bristol to Bath and put up at the house of Walter Robbins in Abbey Green. Robbins had conducted his wedding; now he offered the Fieldings a safe haven beyond the easy reach of creditors. The novelist had come, officially, to take the waters. In practice he also put the finishing touches to Joseph Andrews, the comic masterpiece that would appear in September 1741 and announce him as a major voice in English fiction.

Bath’s literary life then centred on places like James Leake’s bookshop in Terrace Walk, only a few minutes’ stroll from Abbey Green. Leake, brother-in-law and publisher of Samuel Richardson, ran one of the finest bookshops in England. His premises drew the writers, wits and visitors who made the city a major literary hub. 

In this same busy year of 1741, Fielding struck up a friendship with Ralph Allen. Allen had made an enormous fortune as a postal reformer and his magnificent mansion, Prior Park, became a gathering place for writers and other intellectuals. The relationship would prove decisive. 

In 1748 Fielding lived for a time at Twerton, then a village just outside Bath, now absorbed into the city’s western suburbs. Local tradition holds that he wrote part of Tom Jones there. The house long known as Fielding’s Lodge has long since vanished. His sister Sarah, herself a novelist, kept house nearby at Widcombe Lodge. Fielding was a frequent guest at Prior Park. One of Allen’s visitors left an unflattering snapshot of the novelist in his late thirties: “a poor, emaciated, worn-out rake, whose gout and infirmities have got the better of his buffoonery.” The description was harsh but not entirely unfair. Fielding lived hard, and his health was already failing.

Fielding's Bath years left an indelible mark on his greatest novel. Ralph Allen became the model for the benevolent Squire Allworthy. Sophia Western, the spirited heroine, is widely believed to have been drawn from Charlotte Fielding, whose early death left her husband in prolonged grief. Fielding sold the copyright of Tom Jones outright for £600—a handsome sum that nonetheless failed to secure his long-term finances. Duties as a London magistrate soon claimed his time and energy, while gout, jaundice and asthma steadily weakened him. In the spring of 1754, on medical advice, he sailed for Lisbon with his second wife and family to seek a kinder climate. Two months later, at the age of forty-seven, he was dead. He lies among the cypresses of the English cemetery in Portugal’s capital.

Byron offered a more generous verdict than the guest at Prior Park: Fielding was “the prose Homer of human nature.”