Henry Fielding was born in 1707 to Lieutenant George Fielding and his wife Sarah, who was herself the daughter of nobility. Socially, the family hovered at the edges of high society, but they had decidedly middle-class means. Fielding lost his mother in 1718, and his father remarried just a year later and began immediately to raise a new family. That same year Fielding began his education at Eton.

Fielding seems to have been an avid reader and an overly lively student, often flogged for his amorous escapades. Fielding's pursuit of women did not, however, prevent him from absorbing vast quantities of Greek and Latin, or from pursuing the beginnings of a career in drama. His first play, Love in Several Masques, was produced in February of …ver más…

His health was rapidly deteriorating dues to a devastating combination of gout, asthma, jaundice, and dropsy. Fielding's doctor advised him to avoid England's harsh winters, and Fielding decided to go to Portugal. Leaving behind the children from his second marriage, accompanied only by his wife, his first daughter Harriet, and two servants, Fielding left England in the summer of 1754. Ever industrious, he documented his final travels in what would be published posthumously as The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, and the account took him almost to the moment of his death. Henry Fielding died on October eight of the same year, in Junqueira, near Lisbon.
Themes
Virtue as action rather than thought
Fielding contrasts the concept of Virtue espoused by characters like Square and Thwackum with the Virtue actually practiced by Jones and Allworthy. Tom, as the active hero who saves damsels-in-distress and plans on fighting for his country, is the embodiment of the very active type of Virtue that Fielding esteems.

The impossibility of stereotypical categorization
Fielding's novel attempts to break down numerous boundaries. In terms of genre, Fielding cannot decide whether his novel is a "philosophical History," a "Romance," or an "epi-comic prosaic poem."