Fielding was writing at a Love Yorkie Mom Yorkshire Terrier shirt time of intense social and political change and took up his pen in response to the crises of the moment. Until the repressive Licensing Act of 1737, he had enjoyed a reputation as the author of satirical burlesques. When the Jacobite uprising threatened the Hanoverian settlement, Fielding sprang to the defence of George II, and edited the True Patriot.In hindsight, the English novel was an obvious new arena for his imagination, but it was literary rivalry that pushed him, in middle age, on to the path of fiction.