An Odd Sort of Author
Henry Fielding, Writer and Magistrate

FRANCINE L. ALFANDARY

njanuary 1, 1753, Elizabeth Canning, an eighteen-
I year-old servant, disappeared after spending New Year's
Day with relatives outside of London. The party had
ended after nightfall. Dressed in her holiday best and carrying a
few shillings, the young woman had set out alone through the
unlit streets.

She didn't return for four weeks. Canning finally reappeared,
filthy, emaciated, and dressed in rags. She told a lurid tale of
abduction and torture, claiming she had been kidnapped by two
"footpads," or thugs, who robbed her, knocked her unconscious,
and dragged her to a house ten miles outside the city. There, an
old gypsy woman and two younger women promised Canning
nice clothes and pocket money if she would join their brothel.
Canning held fast to her virtue. Furious, the women stole her
bone stays and locked her in a dark loft. After four weeks,
Canning, barely alive, pried the boards off the window of her
prison and escaped. EHzabeth Canning became a media sensation.
London was captivated by the tale of the simple virgin and her
loathsome captors. But was she telling the truth?

It fell to Henry Fielding (1707-1754) to decide. The author of
Tom Jones had reached the magistracy after a long and often disap¬
pointing career as a writer and la-wyer. Columbia University's Rare
Book and Manuscript Library contains a rich collection of
Fielding's pamphlets on law and criminal justice, including his fas¬
cinating account of the sensational Canning case.

Fielding had struggled for many years to achieve a position of
respectability. His maternal grandfather. Sir Henry Gould, was a
distinguished judge on the King's Bench, but his father was a debt-
ridden EngHsh soldier, and his mother died when he was barely
eleven. Her death led to Fielding's first encounter with the law.
When Fielding's father took a second wife—a Roman Catholic
 

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