The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews

Summary

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams is Henry Fielding's first full comic novel, published in February 1742. It began as a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), in which a virtuous servant girl resists her master and is rewarded with marriage. Fielding had already mocked that plot in the short Shamela (1741); Joseph Andrews turns the joke into a wider comic epic of the English road. Joseph, Pamela's supposed brother and footman to Lady Booby, refuses his mistress's advances after her husband's death, is dismissed, and sets out for the country to find his sweetheart, Fanny Goodwill. On the way he is robbed, beaten and left naked in a ditch, then rescued and reunited with the eccentric, Latin-quoting, chicken-loving parson Abraham Adams, who becomes his companion. The middle books follow Joseph, Adams and later Fanny through inns, coaches and country houses. They meet the vain Mrs Slipslop, the brutal landlord and landlady at one inn and the generous host at another, the false promise of a rich man who will not pay Adams's unpaid salary, a hunting squire who sets hounds on the parson, and lawyers and justices more interested in power than truth. Adams's learning and innocence repeatedly collide with vanity and pretended virtue; Joseph's chastity, comic because it reverses Pamela's gendered plot, is tested and held. Fielding interrupts with essays on biography, charity and the comic epic in prose, and he insists he describes not men but manners, not individuals but species. In the final books Joseph and Fanny reach home, survive a threatened forced marriage and a mistaken-identity scare about incest, and learn that Joseph is not Pamela's brother but the kidnapped son of the Wilsons (or, in the discovery plot, of a gentleman family). Lady Booby's schemes fail; Joseph and Fanny marry. The novel established Fielding's blend of mock-heroic narration, roadside adventure and moral comedy that he would enlarge in Tom Jones. The library text is the complete Project Gutenberg edition assembled from volumes 1 and 2.

Top Lessons

• Profession versus practice

  Adams preaches charity and often shows it; other clerics and justices speak of duty while practicing cruelty. Students can list scenes where words and deeds split.

• Parody that outgrows parody

  The book starts as an answer to Pamela and becomes a comic epic of manners. Students can track when the Richardson joke fades and Fielding's own design takes over.

• Chastity and comedy

  Joseph's chastity is played for laughs yet treated as real virtue. Students can ask how comedy can defend a serious moral claim.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Road injuries and beatings appear as comic plot devices, not clinical description.