Charlotte Cradock (1712± – 1744)

In January 2017 Henry Fielding’s biographer, Professor Donald Thomas, unveiled a plaque at 14a The Close to Charlotte Cradock, the beloved wife of the writer and magistrate, Henry Fielding. She is the subject of his last novel Amelia, outlining the trials and tribulations of their early married life. A more personal elegy comes in Tom Jones, in which her husband brings Charlotte to life as the beautiful, virtuous, high-spirited Sophia Western, one of the most admirable heroines in the history of the English novel. Henry and Charlotte were married on 28 February 1734 and lived in Bath and East Stour for a while before settling in London, where Charlotte’s £1,500 legacy was never enough to support Fielding’s theatrical career. He struggled as a journalist, read for the bar, and began to practise. By the end of 1741 he depicts himself as “laid up with the gout, with a favourite child dying in one bed and my wife in a condition very little better in another.” The law courts which Fielding frequented were breeding grounds of gaol fever, a form of typhus which may have been brought home to his family. In the autumn of 1744, having at first made a perfect recovery, Charlotte’s health declined. She died in Fielding’s arms and was buried in London beside the daughter who had died two-and-a-half years earlier.