He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force.

[6] Henry Fielding would construct "the non-ironic pseudonym such as Addison and Steele used in the Spectator, and the ironic mask or Persona, such as Swift used in A Modest Proposal.

[3][7] Although the play that triggered the act was the unproduced, anonymously authored The Golden Rump, Fielding's dramatic satires had set the tone.

Fielding retired from the theatre and resumed his legal career to support his wife Charlotte Craddock and two children by becoming a barrister,[3][7] joining the Middle Temple in 1737 and being called to the bar there in 1740.

[8] Fielding's lack of financial acumen meant the family often endured periods of poverty, but they were helped by Ralph Allen, a wealthy benefactor, on whom Squire Allworthy in Tom Jones would be based.

Lyttelton followed his leader Lord Cobham in forming a Whig opposition to Walpole's government called the Cobhamites, which included another of Fielding's Eton friends, William Pitt.

He sought to evade libel charges by making its political attacks so funny or embarrassing to the victim that a publicized court case would seem even worse.

The novel tells of Tom's alienation from his foster father, Squire Allworthy, and his sweetheart, Sophia Western, and his reconciliation with them after lively and dangerous adventures on the road and in London.

Fielding's varied style tempers the basic seriousness of the novel and his authorial comment before each chapter adds a dimension to a conventional, straightforward narrative.

They had five children; their only daughter Henrietta died at the age of 23, having already been "in deep decline" when she married a military engineer, James Gabriel Montresor, some months before.

Three years after Charlotte's death, Fielding disregarded public opinion by marrying her former maid Mary Daniel, who was pregnant.

Though living in a corrupt and callous society, he became noted for impartial judgements, incorruptibility and compassion for those whom social inequities led into crime.

[4] Joined by his younger half-brother John, he helped found what some call London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, in 1749.

This did not, however, imply opposition to capital punishment as such – as is evident, for example, in his presiding in 1751 over the trial of the notorious criminal James Field, finding him guilty in a robbery and sentencing him to hang.

[24] In January 1752 Fielding started a fortnightly, The Covent-Garden Journal, published under the pseudonym "Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt., Censor of Great Britain" until November of that year.

Gout, asthma and cirrhosis of the liver left him on crutches,[5] and with other afflictions sent him to Portugal in 1754 to seek a cure, only to die two months later in Lisbon, reportedly in pain and mental distress.