Fielding and the Glastonbury Waters

Abstract

As his health worsened during the five years or so before his death in 1754, Fielding, with a hopefulness as irrepressible as it was ill founded, submitted to the ministrations and nostrums of various fashionable empirics. Though his gout continued to plague him, he was sure it could be cured by Dr Thompson, that 'utter and declared enemy to Muffins';1 he swallowed Dr James's powders and 'Spot' Ward's pills and drops; and when these quacks disappointed him he resorted to the published remedies of more learned men, trying the milk diet recommended by Herman Boerhaave and dosing himself with tar water on the advice of Bishop Berkeley. But the most romantic episode in this almost superstitious search for a cure to his ailments has not been fully recorded by his biographers. In the summer of I751 Fielding was drawn back to Glastonbury, the place of his birth, enticed by rumours of the curative properties of a legendary spring of water at the foot of Tor Hill, the imaginary location of Squire Allworthy's 'Paradise Hall' in Tom Jones. Though the fact of his presence in Glastonbury at this time was remarked by Dudden, and though we have also known that the Universal Register Office (in which Fielding and his half-brother John were shareholders) had sole rights of dispensing the waters in London,2 yet Fielding's faith in them as a kind of panacea and his role in promoting public confidence in their efficacy have so far gone unnoticed. The keenness of his interest in the waters is evident from several sources, but chiefly from a letter published anonymously in the General Advertiser for Tuesday, 8 October I75I: a letter which, I will argue, is certainly by Fielding. The grounds of this attribution will be clearer, however, if we first review the circumstances relating to Fielding's journey to Glastonbury and establish, from other evidence, his opinion of the waters. Public interest in the Glastonbury waters was aroused in I75I by the curious case of Matthew Chancellor, an old man from the neighbouring village of North Wootton, who for thirty years had suffered from a severe asthma.3 Chancellor claimed that he had been entirely cured of his affliction as the result of a dream he had had in October of the preceding year: in the