Fielding was a tall, handsome fellow, so full of life and spirits that “his happy disposition,” to quote Lady Mary, “made him forget every evil when he was before a venison-pastry, or over a flask of champagne.”  This rollicking, careless joyousness is the tone of his books.  Whether taken to a prison, an inn, or a lady’s boudoir, whether watching the breaking of heads, the blackening of eyes, or the making of love, the reader is always kept smiling.

Fielding is often censured by moralists for the coarseness of his novels.  But had he not been coarse he would not have been true.  He described life as it was in the eighteenth century, as he had seen it in the ups and downs of a checkered career.  His characters were taken from the higher ranks and the lower.  He placed the house, the amusements, the habits of a country gentleman before the reader with the faithfulness of a man who had hunted, feasted, and got drunk with country-gentlemen.  He described the miserable prisons of his time as he only could who had mingled with their degraded inmates, and had exerted his power as a police magistrate to break up the gangs of ruffians who infested the streets.  Thus Fielding’s novels have a high historical, as well as a literary value.  Mr. Lecky has testified to their importance in a reconstruction of the past by placing “Amelia” among his authorities.  Squire Allworthy, Squire Western, Tom Jones, Parson Adams, are characters to be studied by whoever would understand social life in the eighteenth century.  The lovely Sophia, the modest Fanny, and above all Amelia, whom Thackeray considered “the most charming character in English fiction,” are portraits in the gallery of history.[172]

As Fielding set out to describe truth and nature as he saw them, the reader must put away his notions of refinement and delicacy.  He must be prepared to be entertained by blows, licentious assaults, a tub of hog’s blood thrown by a clergyman, coarse practical jokes, foul talk, all put before him without disguise or circumlocution.  As he follows Parson Adams, Joseph, and Fanny in their journey, he must always be ready for a fight.  Here is a specimen: 

“The captain * * * drew forth his hanger as Adams approached him, and was levelling a blow at his head which would probably have silenced the preacher forever, had not Joseph in that instant lifted up a certain huge stone pot of the chamber with one hand, which six beaux could not have lifted with both, and discharged it, together with the contents, full in the captain’s face.  The uplifted hanger dropped from his hand, and he fell prostrate on the floor with a lumpish noise, and his half-pence rattled in his pocket:  the red liquor which his veins contained, and the white liquor which the pot contained, ran in one stream down his face and his clothes.  Nor had Adams quite escaped, some of the water having in its passage shed its honors on his head, and begun to trickle down the wrinkles, or rather furrows, of his cheeks;