Fielding's Choice

Henry Fielding was a man of many parts: novelist, playwright and (later) co-inventor of London's first professional police force, the Bow Street Runners.

Nevertheless, as a youth born to an impoverished but aristocratic family, he had felt that his choices in life were limited.

'I will have to become,' he declared, 'either a Hackney Writer or a Hackney Coachman.'