After the Licensing Act, Fielding had no recourse if he was to feed his family – he now had two children – but to revert to the sober Gould tradition. In November 1737 he entered the Middle Temple: in June 1740 he was called to the Bar. For the next few years he was a barrister in Assize Courts, travelling on the Western Circuit – Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Hampshire. His rapid start was helped by his uncle, Sir Davidge Gould, a Master of the Bench at the Temple, but he still packed the legal training of several years into two and a half, tackling the law with the same energy as he had play-writing. His friends remembered that he would come back late to his chambers after a heavy night out ‘and there read, and make extracts from, the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed’.

Family life did not put a stop to taverns and coffee-houses or indeed, to Grub Street hack-work, essential to his income. But all his literary work, leading up to his assault on Samuel Richardson in Shamela, was still in some way concerned with the language, form, and morality, and with the way individuals developed a particular ‘persona’ which disguised their essential character and interests. In the terrible winter of 1739–40, for example, he agreed to translate the three volume Military History of Charles XII King of Sweden by Gustave Adlerfeld (already translated from Swedish into French). His plight was that of Mr Wilson in Joseph Andrews, who has to accept translating work for a pittance and is given so much ‘that in half a year I almost writ myself blind’ (JA/S 194), but the task was not without interest. The life of the fiery, despotic Charles XII (1682–1718) fascinated authors from Voltaire and Defoe to Samuel Johnson. Voltaire saw him as a man whose good qualities became vices because taken to excess: to Fielding, as a type of modern Alexander, he was another example of dangerous imbalance and self-obsessed ‘Greatness’. It is no coincidence that his early work on Jonathan Wild dates from this period.