Justice Fielding, the Novel, and the Law

Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life. Routledge, Chapman & Hall (1990). 738 pp. $45.00. Henry Fielding, who wrote the English language's first good comic novels, was the man who founded England's first modem police force.

This understanding lies at the heart of Henry Fielding: A Life, by Martin Battestin, and it matters far more than many better-known connections between law and literature: that Scott was a lawyer, that Kafka was a lawyer, that Dickens was a solicitor's clerk, that Melville spent his working life surrounded by judges.