Out of the paint and powder of the green-room, the tobacco clouds of the tavern, the crowded streets where hungry genius went afoot one day, and rode in a coach the next--in a word, out of the Town as Harry Fielding knew it--we step, in the year 1734, into the idyll of his life, his marriage with Charlotte Cradock. For to Fielding the supreme gift was accorded of passionate devotion to a woman of whose charm and virtue he himself has raised an enduring memorial in the lovely portrait of Sophia Western. It is this portrait, explicitly [admitted], [1] that affords almost our only authentic knowledge of Charlotte Cradock, beyond the meagre facts that her home was in Salisbury, and that there she and her sisters reigned as country belles. For it was not in the gay world of 'Riddoto's, Opera's, and Plays,' nor among the humbler scenes of the great city in which he delighted to watch the humours of simple folk (the highest life being in his opinion 'much the dullest'), that Fielding found his wife. Doubtless his six years about town, as hackney author, with his good birth, his brilliant wit, and his scanty means, had made him well acquainted with every phase of society, "from the Minister at his Levee, to the Bailiff at his spunging-house; from the Duchess at her drum, to the Landlady behind her bar"; but it was in the rural seclusion of an old cathedral town that he wooed and won the beautiful Miss Cradock. Indeed it is impossible to conceive of Sophia as for ever domiciled in streets. The very apostrophe which heralds her first appearance in Tom Jones is fragrant with flower-enamelled meadows, fresh breezes, and the songs of birds "whose sweetest notes not even Handel can excel"; and it is thus, with his reader's mind attuned to the appropriate key, that Fielding ushers in his heroine: "... lo! adorned with all the Charms in which Nature can array her; bedecked with Beauty, Youth, Sprightliness, Innocence, Modesty, and Tenderness, breathing Sweetness from her rosy Lips, and darting Brightness from her sparkling Eyes, the lovely Sophia comes." Of middle size, but rather inclining to tall, with dark hair "curled so gracefully on her neck that few could believe it to be her own," a forehead rather low, arched eyebrows, and lustrous black eyes, a mouth that "exactly answered Sir John Suckling's description in those lines
'Her lips were red and one was thin,
Compar'd to that was next her chin.
Some bee had stung it newly,'"
with a dimple in the right cheek, and a complexion rather more of the lily than the rose unless increased by exercise or modesty when no vermilion could equal it--such was the appearance of Sophia, who, most of all "resembled one whose image never can depart from my breast."
Nor was the beautiful frame, Fielding hastens to add, disgraced by an unworthy inhabitant. He lingers on the sweetness of temper which "diffused a glory over her countenance which no regularity of features can give"; on her perfect breeding, "though wanting perhaps a little of that ease in her behaviour which is to be acquired only by habit, and living within what is called the polite circle"; on the "noble, elevated qualities" which outshone even her beauty.
The only facts recorded concerning Miss Cradock are that her home was in Salisbury, or New Sarum as the city was then called, and that she possessed a small fortune. It is said, but on what authority is not stated, that she was one of three beautiful sisters, the belles of the country town; and it is in accordance with this tradition that Fielding should celebrate in some verses "writ when the Author was very young," the beauty and intellectual charm of the Miss Cradocks. When printing these verses many years afterwards, in his Miscellanies he describes the poem as originally partly filled in with the 'Names of several young Ladies,' which part he now omits, "the rather, as some Freedoms, tho' gentle ones, were taken with little Foibles in the amiable Sex, whom to affront in Print, is, we conceive, mean in any Man, and scandalous in a Gentleman." Certainly the Miss Cradocks suffered no affront in the lines retained, wherein the young poet affirms that of all the famed nymphs of Sarum, that favoured city,
"Whose Nymphs excel all Beauty's Flowers,
As thy high Steeple doth all Towers"
the 'C----cks' were the best and fairest. Nay, has not great Jove himself apportioned a 'celestial Dower' to these most favoured of maidens,
"To form whose lovely Minds and Faces
I stript half Heaven of its Graces."
From this charming sisterhood Harry Fielding won his bride, but not until four years of waiting had been accomplished. So much may be assumed from the early date of the verses entitled "Advice to the Nymphs of New S---m. Written in the Year 1730." Here the newly returned student from Leyden, the successful dramatist from Drury Lane, bids the Salisbury beauties cease their vain endeavours to contend with the matchless charms of his Celia. And here, in a pretty compliment introduced to the great Mr Pope, then at the height of his fame, we are reminded that Celia's lover is already a man of letters, for all his mere three and twenty years. When Celia meets her equal, then, he declares, farthing candles shall eclipse the moon, and "sweet Pope be dull."