Sarah Fielding

When asked by an Earl of Denbigh why, Henry Fielding said, "I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell".

Edmund left the care of his children to his wife's mother, Lady Sarah Gould, while he built his career in London.

The children grew up in her home in Glastonbury and their paternal grandfather's house in East Stour (John Feilding being a latitudinarian Cambridge-educated parish priest with three livings, who had been considered for a bishopric in Ireland.

Sir Henry and Lady Sarah Gould (Fielding's maternal grandparents) had fallen out with Edmund before the death of the children's mother.

Lady Gould was highly displeased with Edmund's second marriage, and Anne Fielding (née Rapha) was the subject of much anti-Catholic sentiment from the elder generation of the family.

The novel was quite successful and gathered praise from contemporaries,[3] including the publisher and novelist Samuel Richardson.

The title pages to Sarah Fielding's other novels often carried the advertisement that they were written by "the author of David Simple".

David Simple was one of the earliest sentimental novels, featuring a wayfaring hero in search of true friendship who triumphs by good nature and moral strength.

Simple is an analogue, in a sense, of the figure of Heartsfree, in Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Squire Allworthy in his Tom Jones.

However, he also shares features with other sentimental figures who find peace only with escape from corruption and the harmony of a new Utopia.