Henry Gould did not long survive the making of his will, and died in March 1710.[1] The Fieldings must then have removed to a small house at East Stour (now Stower), in Dorsetshire, where Sarah Fielding was born in the following November. It may be that this property was purchased with Mrs. Fielding’s money; but information is wanting upon the subject. At East Stour, according to the extracts from the parish register given in Hutchins’s History of Dorset, four children were born,—namely, Sarah, above mentioned, afterwards the authoress of David Simple, Anne, Beatrice, and another son, Edmund. Edmund, says Arthur Murphy, “was an officer in the marine service,” and (adds Mr. Lawrence) “died young.” Anne died at East Stour in August 1716. Of Beatrice nothing further is known. These would appear to have been all the children of Edmund Fielding by his first wife, although, as Sarah Fielding is styled on her monument at Bath the second daughter of General Fielding, it is not impossible that another daughter may have been born at Sharpham Park.
At East Stour the Fieldings certainly resided until April 1718, when Mrs. Fielding died, leaving her elder son a boy of not quite eleven years of age. How much longer the family remained there is unrecorded; but it is clear that a great part of Henry Fielding’s childhood must have been spent by the “pleasant Banks of sweetly-winding Stour” which passes through it, and to which he subsequently refers in Tom Jones. His educa-
- ↑ Mr. Keightley, who seems to have seen the will, dates it—doubtless by a slip of the pen—May 1708. Reference to the original, however, now at Somerset House, shows the correct date to be March 8, 1706, before which time the marriage of Fielding’s parents must therefore be placed.
