Introduction Fielding’s Last Offices

Abstract

Henry Fielding’s last offices were in Bow Street and the Strand. In Bow Street Fielding served as magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex from November 1748 to May 1754, a period during which he interrogated thousands of people—thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, carousers, receivers of stolen goods, con artists, embezzlers, wife beaters, husband beaters, rapists, and murderers—to determine whether alleged lawbreakers should be released, chastised from the bench, or committed to prison to await trial.1 At the same time, several blocks away at the Universal Register Office in the Strand, Fielding’s half-brother John, various clerks, and sometimes Henry Fielding himself made similar kinds of judgments on the truthfulness of presumably law-abiding clients—clergy, landowners, teachers, craftsmen, apprentices, and especially servants—who sought to register property, services, or themselves for sale, rent, or employment. In January 1752, to link and advertise the two institutions, the journalist Henry Fielding launched The Covent-Garden Journal, a periodical that served simultaneously to report and comment on the cases brought before Justice Fielding, to promote the Universal Register Office, and to provide readers with news, entertainment, and social commentary.