Joseph Andrews


The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first full-length novel by the English author Henry Fielding to be published and among the early novels in the English language. Appearing in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a "comic epic poem in prose", it tells of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams.

Inspirations

The novel embodies a fusion of two competing aesthetics of 18th-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.
The novel draws on various inspirations. Written "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote", the work owes much of its humour to the techniques developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. In deference to the literary tastes and recurring tropes of the period, it relies on bawdy humour, an impending marriage and a mystery surrounding unknown parentage, but conversely is rich in philosophical digressions, classical erudition and social purpose.

Background

Fielding's first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a travesty of the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's Pamela and a direct response to them. Richardson's epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her "virtue", battling against her master's attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message—that a girl's chastity has eventual value as a commodity—and the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, along with the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's parody.
Richardson would continue to be a target of Fielding's first novel, but the Pamela phenomenon was just one example of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-18th century. Colley Cibber, poet laureate and mock-hero of Pope's Dunciad, is identified in the first chapter of the novel as another offender against propriety, morality and literary value.
The impetus for the novel, as Fielding claims in the preface, is the establishment of a genre of writing "which I do not remember to have been hitherto attempted in our language", defined as the "comic epic-poem in prose": a work of prose fiction, epic in length and variety of incident and character, in the hypothetical spirit of Homer's lost comic poem Margites. He dissociates his fiction from the scandal-memoir and the contemporary novel. Book III describes the work as biography.
As becomes apparent from the first few chapters of the novel, in which Richardson and Cibber are parodied mercilessly, the real germ of Joseph Andrews is Fielding's objection to the moral and technical limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while Shamela started and finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, in Joseph Andrews Fielding merely uses the perceived deprivation of popular literature as a springboard to conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction.

Plot summary

Book I

The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson's Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of 10, he found himself tending animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. In proving his worth as a horseman, he caught the eye of Sir Thomas's wife, Lady Booby, who now employs him as her footman.
After Sir Thomas's death, Joseph finds his Lady's affections redoubled as she offers herself to him in her chamber while on a trip to London. In a scene analogous to many of Pamela's refusals of Mr. B in Richardson's novel, Lady Booby finds Joseph's Christian commitment to pre-marital chastity unwavering. After suffering the Lady's fury, Joseph sends a letter to his sister much like Pamela's anguished missives in her own novel. The Lady makes one last attempt at seduction before dismissing him from both his job and his lodgings.
As Joseph sets out from London by moonlight, the narrator introduces the novel's heroine, Fanny Goodwill, Joseph's true love. A poor, illiterate girl of 'extraordinary beauty', now living with a farmer close to Lady Booby's parish, she and Joseph had grown ever closer since their childhood, before their local parson and mentor Abraham Adams recommended that they postpone marriage until they have the means to live comfortably.
On his way to see Fanny, Joseph is mugged and laid up in a nearby inn where, by coincidence, he is reunited with Parson Adams, who is on his way to London to sell three volumes of his sermons. The thief is found and brought to the inn, and Joseph is reunited with his possessions. Adams and Joseph catch up with each other, and the parson, in spite of his own poverty, offers his last 9s 3½d to Joseph's disposal.
Joseph and Adams's stay in the inn is capped by one of many burlesque, slapstick digressions in the novel. Betty, the inn's 21-year-old chambermaid, had taken a liking to Joseph, but is doomed to disappointment by Joseph's constancy to Fanny. The landlord, Mr. Tow-wouse, who had always admired Betty, saw this disappointment as an opportunity to take advantage. Locked in an embrace, they are discovered by the choleric Mrs. Tow-wouse, who chases the maid through the house until Adams restrains her. With the landlord promising not to transgress again, his lady allows him to make his peace at the cost of "quietly and contentedly bearing to be reminded of his transgressions, as a kind of penance, once or twice a day, during the residue of his life".

Book II

During his stay in the inn, Adams's hopes for his sermons are mocked in a discussion with a travelling bookseller and another parson. Nevertheless, Adams remains resolved to continue his journey to London until it is revealed that his wife, deciding that he would be more in need of shirts than sermons on his journey, has neglected to pack them. The pair thus decide to return to the parson's parish: Joseph in search of Fanny, and Adams in search of his sermons.
With Joseph following on horseback, Adams finds himself sharing a stage coach with an anonymous lady and Madam Slipslop, an admirer of Joseph's and a servant of Lady Booby. When they pass the house of a teenage girl named Leonora, the anonymous lady is reminded of a story and begins one of the novel's three interpolated tales, "The History of Leonora, or the Unfortunate Jilt". This continues for a number of chapters, punctuated by the questions and interruptions of the other passengers.
After stopping at an inn, Adams relinquishes his seat to Joseph, and forgetting his horse, sets out ahead on foot. Finding himself some time ahead of his friend, Adams rests by the side of the road where he becomes so engaged in conversation with a fellow traveller that he misses the stage coach as it passes. As the night falls and Adams and the stranger discourse on courage and duty, a shriek is heard. The stranger, having seconds earlier lauded the virtues of bravery and chivalry, makes his excuses and flees the scene without turning back. Adams, however, rushes to the girl's aid and after a mock-epic struggle knocks her attacker unconscious. In spite of Adams's good intentions, he and the girl, who reveals herself to be none other than Fanny Goodwill, find themselves accused of assault and robbery.
After some comic litigious wrangling before the local magistrate, the pair are eventually released and depart shortly after midnight in search of Joseph. They do not have to walk far before a storm forces them into the same inn that Joseph and Slipslop have chosen for the night. Slipslop, her jealousy ignited by seeing the two lovers reunited, departs angrily. When Adams, Joseph and Fanny come to leave the following morning, they find their departure delayed by an inability to settle the bill, and, with Adams's solicitations of a loan from the local parson and his wealthy parishioners failing, it falls on a local peddler to rescue the trio by loaning them his last 6s 6d.
The solicitations of charity that Adams is forced to make, and the complications which surround their stay in the parish, bring him into contact with many local squires, gentlemen and parsons, and much of the latter part of Book II is taken up by discussions of literature, religion, philosophy and trade that result.

Book III

The three depart the inn by night, and it is not long before Fanny needs to rest. With the party silent, they overhear approaching voices agree on "the murder of any one they meet" and flee to a local house. Inviting them in, the owner, Mr. Wilson, informs them that the gang of supposed murderers were in fact sheep-stealers, intent more on the killing of livestock than of Adams and his friends. The party being settled, Wilson begins the novel's most lengthy interpolated tale by recounting his life story; a story which bears a notable resemblance to Fielding's own youth.
At the age of 16, Wilson's father died and left him a modest fortune. Finding himself the master of his destiny, he left school and travelled to London where he soon acquainted himself with the dress, manners and reputation for womanising necessary to consider himself a "beau". Wilson's life in the town is a façade: he writes love-letters to himself, obtains his fine clothes on credit, and is concerned more to be seen at the theatre than to watch the play. After two bad experiences with women, he is financially crippled, and much like Fielding, falls into the company of a group of Deists, freethinkers and gamblers. Finding himself in debt, he, like Fielding, turns to the writing of plays and hack journalism to alleviate his financial problems. He spends his last few pence on a lottery ticket, but with no reliable income, is soon forced to exchange it for food. While in jail for his debts, news reaches him that the ticket he gave away has won a £3,000 prize. His disappointment is short-lived, however, as the daughter of the winner hears of his plight, pays off his debts, and, after a brief courtship, agrees to marry him.
Wilson found himself at the mercy of many of the social ills that Fielding had written about in his journalism: the over-saturated and abused literary market, the exploitative state lottery, and regressive laws which sanctioned imprisonment for small debts. Having seen the corrupting influence of wealth and the town, he retires with his new wife to the rural solitude in which Adams, Fanny and Joseph find them. The only break in his contentment, and one which turns out to be significant to the plot, was the kidnapping of his eldest son, whom he has not seen since.
Wilson promises to visit Adams when he passes through his parish, and after another mock-epic battle on the road, this time with a party of hunting dogs, the trio proceed to the house of a local squire, where Fielding illustrates another contemporary social ill by having Adams subjected to a humiliating roasting. Enraged, the three depart to the nearest inn to find that, while at the squire's house, they had been robbed of their last half-guinea. To compound their misery, the squire has Adams and Joseph accused of kidnapping Fanny, to have them detained while he orders the abduction of the girl himself. She is rescued in transit, however, by Lady Booby's steward, Peter Pounce, and all four of them complete the remainder of the journey to Booby Hall together.