Joseph Andrews

Overview

About three hundred pages, Henry Fielding’s first novel, published in 1742, which began its life as a direct parody of Samuel Richardson’s enormously popular and morally earnest novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, a story of a virtuous servant girl repeatedly resisting her employer’s romantic advances. Fielding’s initial premise inverts this situation directly: Joseph Andrews, presented as Pamela’s own brother and himself a footman, is dismissed from his position after repeatedly and steadfastly refusing the advances of his employer, the widowed Lady Booby, a parodic inversion of Richardson’s original scenario that Fielding uses as his novel’s initial comic launching point.

What began as parody, however, developed as Fielding wrote into something considerably more original and more formally significant: a deliberate, self-conscious new prose form Fielding names directly in his preface as the comic epic poem in prose, a genre he distinguishes explicitly from tragedy by its happier resolution and more ordinary characters, and from mere burlesque by its faithful rather than exaggerated imitation of actual nature and manners, an important early theoretical statement about the developing English novel as a genre still actively working out its own rules and conventions.

What happens

Joseph’s dismissal and the road. Following his dismissal from Lady Booby’s household, Joseph Andrews sets out on the road toward the countryside to find his beloved Fanny Goodwill, encountering along the way a series of misadventures, he is robbed and beaten by highwaymen before being rescued, that establish the novel’s episodic, road-narrative structure, a picaresque form that will organize the majority of the book’s subsequent action.

Parson Adams takes over. Joseph is soon joined on the road, initially by coincidence, by Parson Abraham Adams, a learned but genuinely poor, absent-minded and unfailingly brave country clergyman, and it is Adams, rather than Joseph himself, who quickly emerges as the novel’s real center of interest and its genuine moral touchstone, his learning and his consistent, unaffected goodness tested repeatedly against a comic gauntlet of innkeepers, hypocritical fellow clergy and squires of varying genuine and merely performed virtue.

Comic episodes on the road. The novel’s substantial middle section consists largely of a sequence of loosely connected comic episodes encountered along the road, innkeepers of varying honesty, clergy whose professed piety does not survive close observation, and squires whose social position frequently proves inversely related to their actual moral character, giving Fielding considerable opportunity for social satire organized around the recurring gap between genuine virtue and merely performed or inherited social respectability.

Fanny and the romantic throughline. Running alongside these comic episodes, though treated with considerably less sustained narrative attention than the road’s picaresque adventures, is Joseph’s steady devotion to Fanny, complicated by various interruptions and obstacles but never seriously in doubt as the novel’s eventual romantic destination, a throughline that provides narrative continuity without ever becoming the book’s primary source of interest or comic energy.

Comic resolution through disclosure. The novel resolves in the conventional manner of stage comedy, through a series of revelations about hidden or previously mistaken identity and parentage that clear away the various obstacles to Joseph and Fanny’s marriage, a resolution Fielding deploys with evident self-aware playfulness rather than complete narrative seriousness, acknowledging the mechanism’s conventional, almost formulaic character even while employing it.

How to read it

Read Fielding’s preface carefully before or alongside the novel itself, since his direct, deliberate definition of the comic epic poem in prose represents a genuinely significant early theoretical statement about the developing English novel form, and understanding this stated theoretical ambition clarifies choices in the narrative that might otherwise read as merely loose or episodic.

Notice how quickly and how thoroughly Parson Adams displaces Joseph as the novel’s actual center of interest despite the title’s naming; Adams’s combination of genuine learning, genuine poverty, comic absent-mindedness and consistent underlying goodness makes him considerably more vivid and more significant than the nominal hero whose adventures technically frame the narrative.

Pay attention to how the novel’s parodic origin, inverting Richardson’s Pamela, continues to inform its broader satirical treatment of virtue, hypocrisy and social class even as the narrative moves well beyond its initial parodic premise into more independently developed comic and social territory.

Consider the episodic road structure as Fielding’s deliberate method for surveying a genuine cross-section of contemporary English social life, encountering a wide variety of social types and testing them against a consistent standard of genuine versus merely performed virtue, rather than as a structural weakness relative to more tightly unified plotting.

Read this novel alongside Fielding’s later, considerably more structurally ambitious Tom Jones to see how the comic epic prose form Fielding first defined and tested here would develop into a more fully realized and more intricately plotted achievement in his subsequent major work.

Questions it raises

• Does Parson Adams’s emergence as the novel’s real moral and comic center, displacing the nominal hero Joseph, represent a deliberate structural choice on Fielding’s part, or does it reflect Fielding discovering, in the course of writing, a character considerably more interesting than his original parodic premise had anticipated?
• How does the novel’s parodic origin, directly inverting Richardson’s Pamela, shape its broader treatment of virtue and hypocrisy? Does starting from parody ultimately limit or actually enable the more independent social satire the novel develops as it proceeds?
• What does Fielding’s explicit theoretical definition of the comic epic poem in prose, offered directly in his preface, suggest about the state of the English novel as a genre still working out its own rules and conventions during this period?
• Does the novel’s episodic road structure, moving through a sequence of loosely connected comic encounters, successfully substitute for more unified plotting as a way of surveying contemporary social life, or does this structure ultimately feel more like a sequence of separate sketches than a fully integrated narrative?
• How should a reader weigh the novel’s comic resolution through disclosure of hidden identity and parentage, a deliberately conventional device Fielding employs with self-aware playfulness? Does this self-awareness redeem the device’s inherent artificiality, or does the resolution still feel unearned relative to the more genuinely observed social comedy preceding it?
• What does the considerable gap in narrative interest between Joseph’s own relatively thin romantic throughline and Parson Adams’s much more vivid comic characterization suggest about where Fielding’s actual novelistic talents and interests lay at this early point in his career as a novelist?