Queer Places:
Milbourne House, 7A Church Rd, London SW13 0DQ, Regno Unito
Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and
dramatist known for his rich, earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the
author of the picaresque novel Tom Jones. Additionally, he holds a
significant place in the history of law enforcement, having used his authority
as a magistrate to found (with his half-brother John) what some have called
London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners.
Henry Fielding's younger sister,
Sarah Fielding,
also became a successful writer.[1]
In Henry Fielding's
The Female Husband (1746), a highly fictionalised account of the female
cross-dresser, May Hamilton, the heroine is first seduced into same-sex
passion by a Methodist, Anne Johnson.
A woman like Mary Hamilton, who was publicly whipped and sent to prison for
‘marrying’ three unsuspecting women – as described in Henry Fielding’s The
Female Husband – was punished, not as a female sodomite, but as someone who
had ‘by false and deceitful practices endeavoured to impose on some of his
Majesty’s subjects’.
Martin C. Battestin explains that
John, Lord Hervey was
the original of Beau Didapper in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742),
suggesting that Hervey is also memorialized in Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot"
as "Sporus, that "mere-white Curd of Ass's milk... This painted Child of Dirt
that stinks and stings."
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fielding
- A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500,
Rebecca Jennings, Greenwood World Pub., 2007
- Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century .
Pan Macmillan. Edizione del Kindle.
- Men in Love, Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, by
George E. Haggerty