The full title of this novel is “The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams”, under which is added “Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote”. It was published in 1742. Henry Fielding, the son of Lt Gen. Edmund Fielding, had been writing plays since 1728, and had recently delivered Shamela (1741), a novella-length satire of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Joseph Andrews is connected to that satire; Joseph Andrews the character is actually the fictional brother of the fictional Pamela Andrews, as Fielding’s disdain for Richardson’s heroine called for more ink, for a longer work which has been called the first English novel by at least one academic. In his preface Fielding describes the features of the very form he is helping to create. What will later be called the novel is in his formulation the “comic epic poem in prose”, with more plot incident and variety of characters than comedy, with a lighter approach to fable and action and characters lower in social rank than are found in romance, and with “sentiments and diction” that recreate “the ludicrous instead of the sublime”.
The action of Joseph Andrews is episodic, and much of it occurs on the road. Readers of Don Quixote, and/or indeed of Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) will find it familiar in that respect. The young and handsome hero Joseph, apparently the only son of Gaffer and Gammer Andrews, and brother to Pamela, is a footman to one Lady Booby. After the death of her husband Sir Thomas Booby, the lady makes advances towards him. Not interested, he has anyhow promised marriage to Fanny Goodwill, a girl of modest background living in a nearby parish. A curate, Abraham Adams, serves as mentor to the two youngsters, recommending they marry only when Joseph has a good living. The spurned Lady Booby dismisses Joseph, who, setting out to see Fanny, is roughly robbed and has to recuperate at an inn. There he runs into Parson Adams, and this is only the first of many such coincidences. Parson Adams needs to retrieve some sermons from his home in Fanny’s parish, so he and the hero are to go there together. There will be many further diversions, delays, and detours. Joseph and Parson Adams borrow a lot of money from strangers to sustain their adventures. They have to fight off a pack of hunting dogs and protect Fanny from scoundrels, and as marriage approaches Joseph and Fanny must endure the further attentions and ploys of Lady Booby to stay true to each other. Questions of parentage will appear to threaten their union, though the answers will eventually provide sanction.
Joseph Andrews is divided into four books, and each book into between thirteen and eighteen chapters. Each chapter has a heading, some as simple as “Of several new matters not expected”, and others as elaborate as “A dialogue between Mr. Abraham Adams and his host, which, by the disagreement in their opinions, seemed to threaten an unlucky catastrophe, had it not been timely prevented by the return of the lovers.” Most chapters start in the familiar manner with the continuation of action or dialogue that was paused at the end of the previous, but some start with meta-textual comment. Fielding wishes his plot to be unpredictable, and at the beginning of Book I, he concerns himself with predictability: “It is an observation sometimes made, that to indicate our idea of a simple fellow, we say, he is easily to be seen through: nor do I believe it a more improper denotation of a simple book.” In Fielding’s work, by contrast, “the scene opens itself by small degrees”. Chapter I of Book Two actually begins on the subject of chapter and book divisions, leading to a very useful analogy. In Joseph Andrews, a traveling tale of a few weeks’ timespan, “those little spaces between our chapters may be looked upon as an inn or resting-place where he may stop and take a glass, or any other refreshment, as it pleases him.” The page breaks between books are then compared to longer rests, opportunities for mental review, and those chapter headings to inscriptions at the inns advertising the entertainments on offer inside. Fielding gets himself into a pleasant confusion with this fanciful stuff, unsure whether the chapters or the spaces between them are the inns. He turns to a general discourse on chapters, and the reader soon realizes that this particular chapter is entirely concerned with the author’s art, and will not achieve any progress in the story. Homer is remembered to have divided his great work into twenty-four books, and Virgil with his twelve-chaptered Aeneid is thought to “insinuate that he pretends to no more than half the merit of the Greek”. Another final analogy, that between the author’s division of his book into chapters and the butcher’s cleaving a carcass into joints, is oddly unresolved in that the reader is not compared to the eater, but to the carver. Fielding writes that the chapter headings can be used to decide which chapters one might skip over, which joints one might avoid, but it’s a lean, austere scholar who would further excise the fat. In Fielding’s own great work, Tom Jones, an eighteen-book median between Homer and Virgil, the analogy or set of analogies will return, as the introduction will make much of itself as a “bill of fare to the feast”.
And what sustenance is to be found here? Start with Lady Booby’s servant, Slipslop. A “mighty affecter of hard words”, Madam Slipslop is given to malapropism, saying “refer” when she means “prefer”, “currycuristic” for “characteristic”, and perhaps true to her profession, “ironing” for “irony”. Slipslop with others is given also to moral affectation, which Fielding in his preface has called the “only source of the true Ridiculous”. This affectation, being the pretense of virtue, has as its origins vanity and hypocrisy, the latter defined as the concealment of vice by that pretend virtue. Thus Slipslop and Lady Booby accuse each other of favoring Joseph, both being so to speak guilty, and a gentleman met by Parson Adams lengthily “descants on bravery and heroic virtue”, but then, upon hearing Fanny’s nearby shrieks, runs home, fearing robbers. Adams shows courage in that episode, but in Book IV his own finely worded principles are tested in much the same immediate manner as that gentleman’s: he gives the passionate Joseph a sermon on his namesake Abraham’s obedience, the necessity of subordinating even paternal love to divine Providence, and then someone walks in and tells him that his son has drowned. The son soon appears sodden but alive, the report having been hasty and presumptuous, but Adams, who had been inconsolable, now seems less trustworthy. The scene is comic in style only, in the abruptness of the announcement and its rapid correction, as its import is a little troubling, changing our view of Adams who had seemed wholly God-fearing and principled. It was affectation by minor characters and caricatures that had been the object of comic derision, but if one has caught Adams in that act, it would seem that very few could be innocent of that charge.
If Parson Adams appraisal was accurate, the hero Joseph is occasionally excessively passionate. Perhaps because he is never tested quite so directly as was Adams in the drowning scene, he is otherwise apparently without fault, and Fanny too seems an embodiment of virtue. In Book IV, Chapter VI, Slipslop, though she could never credit Fanny for anything, gives a long encomium to Joseph, for Lady Booby’s benefit. It’s all colored by blushing affection, but she has been provoked by her lady’s insults to defend the lowborn, herself as well as the former footman. Thankfully, Fielding does not forget her Archie Bunkerism as he authors her rebuke: “Really, your ladyship talks of servants, as if they were not born of the Christian specious.” One can take Slipslop seriously for a moment here. Parson Adams has a few times insisted on universal human dignity, and even the capricious Lady Booby had just lamented the obligation to “prefer birth, title and fortune, to real merit”. In Part II, Chapter II, Fielding plays down the importance of parentage with a whimsical hypothetical in which Joseph had “sprung up, according to the modern phrase, out of a dunghill”. So it’s possible to reach the end of Slipslop’s speech with the impression that the author has some anti-aristocratic feeling. But any such lofty, swollen sentiment is soon deflated. Lady Booby is unmoved, dismissing Slipslop and telling her with uncharacteristically mild manner that she is a “comical creature”. And in the conclusion of the story, with its series of breathless revelations, the false giving way to the true, Fielding makes ironic his own earlier comments on the apparent irrelevance of Joseph’s ancestry. Everyone is put in his proper place, and beds are made. At the wedding feast, blessedly non-consanguineous Joseph and Fanny anticipate a course which Fielding cannot serve, “the much more exquisite repast which the approach of night promised them”.