Borgmeier, Raimund
“Henry Fielding and his Spanish Model: ‘Our English Cervantes’”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 43-64.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was so deeply influenced by Cervantes that some of his contemporaries called him “our English Cervantes”. The impact the Spanish master and his Don Quixote had is to be traced, above all, in one play and two major novels, and one can observe that Fielding, more and more, artistically transformed the material he found in the Spanish original. In the ballad opera Don Quixote in England (1734) he brings the knight-errant and his squire to English soil, where they show their well-known idiosyncrasies and are confronted with English customs and institutions, which Fielding uses for satiric purposes. Fielding’s first major novel Joseph Andrews (1742) is also in many ways indebted to Cervantes, particularly as far as its narrative concept and comic approach are concerned. The main quixotic personage, however, is no longer the Spanish knight but an English country parson. In the author’s magnum opus, Tom Jones (1749), the Cervantine elements are still recognizable, yet transmuted even further.