ABSTRACT
Like the history of Tom Jones, his foundling hero, Henry Fielding's own story begins in Glastonbury, Somerset, where — at Sharpham Park, the country seat of his maternal grandfather Sir Henry Gould — he was born on 22 April 1707. So Arthur Murphy, Fielding's first biographer, asserted; and so the authors can now affirm with certainty — together with the additional circumstance that he was baptized on 6 May at St. Benedict's church, where, in the Sharpham chapel, the Goulds customarily worshipped. As the setting for the birth of this very English author there could hardly have been a more suitable place than Glastonbury — the legendary Isle of Avalon, which monkish historians such as John of Glastonbury had claimed to be both the “fountain and origin” of the Christian faith in Britain and the burial place of King Arthur.
