Henry Fielding in the context of "Jack the Giant Killer"

James Lacy (1696–1774) was a British stage actor and theatre manager.

He joined John Rich's company at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1724. His wife acted alongside him, and together they appeared in the premiere of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera as Robin of Bagshot and Dolly Trull respectively. During the 1730s, he collaborated with Henry Fielding, appearing as Witmore in his The Author's Farce and working with him at Bartholomew Fair. He got in trouble for producing plays illegally following the passage of a new Licensing Act in 1737.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on 28 February 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels, in which Maugham ranks the ten best novels of the world.

The novel is highly organised despite its length. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned", alongside Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. It became a best-seller, with four editions published in its first year alone. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel.

The Author's Farce and the Pleasures of the Town is a play by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding, first performed on 30 March 1730 at the Little Theatre, Haymarket. Written in response to the Theatre Royal's rejection of his earlier plays, The Author's Farce was Fielding's first theatrical success. The Little Theatre allowed Fielding the freedom to experiment, and to alter the traditional comedy genre. The play ran during the early 1730s and was altered for its run starting 21 April 1730 and again in response to the Actor Rebellion of 1733. Throughout its life, the play was coupled with several different plays, including The Cheats of Scapin and Fielding's Tom Thumb.

The first and second acts deal with the attempts of the central character, Harry Luckless, to woo his landlady's daughter, and his efforts to make money by writing plays. In the second act, he finishes a puppet theatre play titled The Pleasures of the Town, about the Goddess Nonsense's choice of a husband from allegorical representatives of theatre and other literary genres. After its rejection by one theatre, Luckless's play is staged at another. The third act becomes a play within a play, in which the characters in the puppet play are portrayed by humans. The Author's Farce ends with a merging of the play's and the puppet show's realities.

The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr (1708) by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1665 – c. 1732), about whom few biographical details are known.

A satirical epic set in the 1680s–90s in London and colonial Maryland, the novel tells of a fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and commissioned to write a Marylandiad to sing the praises of the colony. He undergoes adventures on his journey to and within Maryland while striving to preserve his virginity. The complicated Tom Jones–like plot is interwoven with numerous digressions and stories-within-stories, and is written in a style patterned on the writing of 18th-century novelists such as Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett.

Ten Novels and Their Authors (originally published as Great Novelists and Their Novels) is a 1948 work of literary criticism by William Somerset Maugham. Maugham collects together what he considers to have been the ten greatest novels and writes about the books and the authors. The ten novels are:

1. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
4. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
10. War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)

This book was originally a series of magazine articles commissioned by Redbook.

Samuel Richardson (baptised 19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an English writer and printer known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). He printed almost 500 works, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar. Richardson had been apprenticed to the printer John Wilde, whose daughter Martha he eventually married. All six of their children died in infancy or childbirth, with Martha herself dying in childbirth in 1731. In 1733, he married Elizabeth Leake, daughter of printer John Leake. Together they had six more children, of whom four daughters reached adulthood. Richardson's first novel, Pamela, was penned at the age of 51 and was an instant success. Leading acquaintances included Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding, the physician and Behmenist George Cheyne, and the theologian and writer William Law, whose books he printed. At Law's request, Richardson printed some poems by John Byrom. In literature, he rivalled Henry Fielding; the two responded to each other's literary styles.

Mrs. (American English) or Mrs (British English; standard English pronunciation: /ˈmɪsɪz/ MISS-iz) is a commonly used English honorific for women, usually for those who are married and who do not instead use another title or rank, such as Doctor, Professor, President, Dame, etc. In most Commonwealth countries, a full stop (period) is usually not used with the title. In the United States and Canada a period (full stop) is usually used (see Abbreviation).

Mrs. originated as a contraction of the honorific Mistress (the feminine of Mister or Master) which was originally applied to both married and unmarried women in the upper class. Writers who used Mrs for unmarried women include Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson. The split into Mrs for married women and Miss for unmarried began during the 17th century, but was not reliable until well into the 19th century.

The Bow Street Runners were the law enforcement officers of the Bow Street Magistrates' Court in the City of Westminster. They have been called London's first professional police force. The force originally numbered six men and was founded in 1749 by magistrate Henry Fielding, who was also well known as an author. His assistant, brother, and successor as magistrate, John Fielding, moulded the constables into a professional and effective force. Bow Street Runners was the public's nickname for the officers although the officers did not use the term themselves and considered it derogatory. The group was disbanded in 1839 and its personnel merged with the Metropolitan Police, which had been formed ten years earlier but the London metropolitan detective bureau trace their origins back from there.