Biography of Henry Fielding

Fielding was born in 1707 in Somerset, England and went to school at Eton College. After his mother’s
death when he was 11, Fielding was raised by his grandmother. However, he kept in contact with his
father, who had a reputation for living a wild lifestyle. At age 18, he tried to abduct his rich cousin, Sarah
Andrews, on the way to church in order to marry her against her parents’ wishes, but her family foiled
the attempt. After studying classics and law, he got his start as a writer working in theater in London.
Many of his works contain elements of satire, and at times he wrote under a pseudonym to hide his
identity. His first major success was Shamela, an anonymously published parody of Samuel Richardson’s
novel Pamela, and Fielding followed it a year later with the even more successful Joseph Andrews.
Fielding continued to publish other novels over the course of his life, most notably Tom Jones in 1749,
which remains his most famous work. He was in poor health near the end of his life and sought a cure in
Lisbon, Portugal, but he died and was buried there two months later.

Historical Context of Joseph Andrews

Henry Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews during a period called the Enlightenment, a wide-ranging scientific
and philosophical movement that revolutionized life in Europe. In addition to technological
breakthroughs, there were also new ideas about government that stressed reason, individual liberty,
and religious tolerance—all ideas that appear in Joseph Andrews. Fielding was himself a magistrate who
was involved with England’s transition to a more standardized legal code, and the questions of justice
that he faced in his non-writing work also come up in his novel.

Summary of Joseph Andrew

The narrator of the story introduces Joseph Andrews, who is the brother of a famously virtuous woman
named Pamela. Joseph is a capable, handsome boy who ends up tending animals for Sir Thomas Booby.
There, he attracts the attention of Lady Booby, who makes Joseph her footman. When he’s a little older,
he travels with Lady Booby to London, where, after Thomas Booby’s death, she tries to seduce Joseph.
Joseph, however, remains committed to chastity, just like his famous sister. This annoys Lady Booby, and
when her scheming maid Lady Slipslop tells lies about Joseph being a scoundrel, she uses it as an excuse
to fire Joseph.

Joseph heads back from London to the country, hoping to see his longtime love Fanny. She used to be a
chambermaid for the Booby family, but Joseph hasn’t seen her for a year. On his way back, however,
Joseph is mugged and robbed of everything, even his clothes. He suffers serious injuries and ends up at
the inn of Mr. Tow-wouse, where everyone believes that Joseph will soon die. Only the kind
chambermaid Betty gives Joseph any aid. Joseph does eventually recover, however, and at the inn he
happens to run into his old friend Abraham Adams, a bookish parson who always carries around a copy
of the works of Aeschylus.

Abraham Adams hopes to sell some books of his sermons in London, but as he checks his bag, he
realizes that his wife, Mrs. Adams, replaced several of his books in his bag with shirts. He decides to go
back to fetch his sermons, which means that he and Joseph will be traveling in the same direction. They
travel together, sometimes by coach, and in one coach they hear the long story of a young woman
named Leonora whose lover rejected her.

At one point, Adams gets distracted and goes off on a long walk on his own. He happens to hear the
shouting of a woman being attacked, so he rushes to fend off her attacker. It turns out this woman is
Fanny—the very woman that Joseph was looking for. Adams takes Fanny back to a local inn, where
Joseph and Fanny are joyfully reunited. The next day, Adams struggles to pay their bill at the inn, but he
finally manages to get a loan from a poor pedlar.

After leaving the inn, Adams, Joseph, and Fanny are in a field one night when they hear voices that they
believe are murderous ghosts (which actually turn out to be people trying to steal sheep). The three run
off and find themselves staying with Wilson. Wilson is a gentleman who tells a long story about how he
used to be a rake who wrote plays, womanized around London, and got thrown in jail for debts.
Eventually, however, he married a woman named Harriet and has been happy ever since, except for the
fact that he has a son with a strawberry mark on his chest who was stolen from him at a young age.

After more traveling, Joseph, Adams, and Fanny finally make it back to their home parish. Lady Booby
has also returned from London, having passed them along the way. Joseph is eager to finally marry
Fanny, but Lady Booby still pines for Joseph, and so she concocts a plan to prevent them from marrying.
She goes to Justice Frolick and arranges for Joseph and Fanny to be sent to prison over stealing a twig,
but her nephew, Squire Booby, knows the justice and prevents this. This is because his new wife,
Pamela, is Joseph’s sister, so Joseph is part of his family. Lady Booby tries a new approach, asking Squire
Booby and Pamela to convince Joseph that Fanny isn’t of a high enough social class for him, but Joseph
isn’t convinced. Around the same time, the evil Beau Didapper tries to rape Fanny, increasing Joseph’s
eagerness to get married as soon as possible so he can protect Fanny.

The poor pedlar from Joseph, Fanny, and Adams’s journey home makes a surprising reappearance when
he saves Adams’s son Dick from drowning. He has even more shocking news to share with everyone: he
knows that Fanny’s real parents are Gaffar and Gammar Andrews, meaning that she is Joseph’s sister,
and the wedding must be called off.The pedlar’s story causes confusion and temporarily stops the
wedding. But as Gammar Andrews reveals after she arrives, Joseph is not actually her biological son. As
it turns out, Joseph is actually Wilson’s stolen son; he was swapped in the cradle with Fanny by a
fortune-teller visiting Gammar. Wilson himself arrives to confirm this, and Joseph reveals that he has a
strawberry mark on his chest, just like Wilson’s lost child. The wedding is back on, with Adams
conducting the ceremony. Joseph and Fanny live together happily with Joseph’s parents, and Fanny is
soon pregnant. Meanwhile, Lady Booby goes back to London and takes up with a young captain who
makes her forget all about Joseph.

Themes

Social class

Social class is an important issue for all of the characters in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. As the
lawyer Scout notes, the wealthy upper classes in England are above the law—but the law can be bent to
do just about anything to the poor. Additionally, society expects people to marry within their own social
classes, and characters are often willing to go to great lengths when given the rare opportunity to
improve their own class. For example, in a story-within-the-story, the young lady Leonora abandons her
faithful lover Horatio for a chance to match with a seemingly even higher-class man named Bellarmine.
This ends disastrously for her, with Bellarmine rejecting Leonora after her father’s marriage offer is too
stingy for him, highlighting the dangers of trying to challenge the rigid social order.

Despite what the characters themselves might believe, however, the novel makes it clear that having a
higher social status doesn’t make a person more virtuous—in fact, it’s usually the opposite. The ending
of the novel revolves around Joseph Andrews’s determination to marry Fanny, despite her lack of
money and lower social class. Almost everyone agrees that Fanny is a beautiful and virtuous woman, but
many characters can’t accept that a person of her social status could ever be a worthwhile wife.
Ultimately, the matter is resolved not by characters facing their prejudices but through a comically
contrived series of events that reveals that Fanny is from a higher social class than she originally
thought. Although nothing about her has changed, many like the upper-class Squire Booby now drop
their objections to the marriage, showing how flimsy the foundations of the whole class system can be.
In Joseph Andrews, Fielding simultaneously depicts how central social class was to life in 18th-century
England while also ridiculing the system and showing its flaws and limitations.

Lust vs. Chastity

Henry Fielding’s short novel Joseph Andrews is in part a parody of a longer novel called Pamela,
published by Samuel Richardson just two years earlier in 1740. The novel’s protagonist, Pamela, faces
many hardships and threats to her chastity. Ultimately, however, as the title of the book makes plain,
she is rewarded for her virtue, affirming the value of chastity and providing a clear lesson to the book’s
audience. Unlike Pamela, however, in which Pamela also appears, Joseph Andrews does not necessarily
give the audience a straightforward moral lesson about chastity and lust.

Still Joseph Andrews generally portrays chaste (and happily married) characters more positively than
lustful ones. The title character, Joseph Andrews, is just as chaste as his famous sister Pamela was
before she got married, and his loyalty to his eventual wife Fanny is sincere. This makes Joseph one of
the most honest characters in the story. On the other hand, lustful characters often have other
prominent flaws that make them less positive characters. Lady Booby, for example, is so blind with lust
for Joseph that she tries to sabotage his marriage to Fanny for purely selfish reasons. The equally lusty
Mrs. Slipslop helps Lady Booby, trying to selfishly claim Joseph for herself. Nevertheless, the characters
in the novel don’t always fit into a black-and-white system of morality. For example, the virtuous Pamela
and her husband, Squire Booby, are arguably too supportive of chastity, nearly stopping Joseph’s well-
suited marriage to Fanny. Furthermore, Lady Booby faces few consequences for her actions—at the end
of the novel, she simply finds another man who helps her forget all about Joseph. Ultimately, Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews doesn’t totally reject traditional moral teachings about lust and chastity, but it does
complicate the issue, suggesting that it’s possible to be too morally upright—and also that not all
villains get punished.
Hypocrisy

Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is full of characters who act one way on the surface—but who are
often very different on the inside. The novel is a comedy, with most of the humor coming from satire,
where the characters’ flaws are exposed for humor and as a commentary on how people act in the real
world. Perhaps the most important character for setting the satirical tone is the narrator, who maintains
a sarcastic style throughout the story. The narrator rarely calls the characters hypocrites directly, but he
often presents information in a way that highlights how a character’s outward appearance differs from
their true nature.

The main character, Joseph Andrews, is not himself particularly hypocritical: his love for Fanny is simple
and direct. By contrast, many of the characters that Joseph meets on his travels have hidden
motivations, making for a humorous contrast with the naïve Joseph. Parson Abraham Adams, for
example, is one of Joseph’s companions, and he constantly fails to live up to his own ideals. While he
fancies himself a man with a well-rounded education, he seems to have wide gaps in his knowledge, and
so he keeps returning to familiar subjects like the Greek playwright Aeschylus to hide how many things
he doesn’t know. Another hypocrite is the landlord Mr. Tow-wouse, who pretends to be a good host—
but who is so inconsiderate that his maid Betty has to do many parts of his job for him, all while Mr.
Tow-wouse harasses her. Even the famously virtuous Pamela reveals a hypocritical side when she
advises Joseph not to marry a former chambermaid (even though Pamela herself is a former
chambermaid who married a gentleman). In Joseph Andrews, Fielding explores how people deceive
themselves and others, making fun of this tendency and suggesting that perhaps these deceptions aren’t
so effective after all.

Religion and Charity

Aside from Joseph Andrews himself, the most prominent character in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is
a parson by the name of Abraham Adams. Adams is a complicated character; on one hand, he can seem
hypocritically selfish, pretending to act like a charitable man when he’s actually living on the charity of
others. Adams eats and drinks a lot but rarely has the money to pay his bills and so must rely on “loans”
from acquaintances that he seems unlikely to pay back. The reader may interpret Adams’s personal
behavior could as a parody of how many churches preach charity while relying on donations from
members (and sometimes abusing these donations). But while many aspects of Adams’s character seem
to critique the hypocrisy of organized religion, Adams also has positive qualities—in particular, his
loyalty to looking out for the welfare of Joseph and Fanny.

While Adams is the most prominent example of a character who hypocritically preaches charity, many
other righteous characters in the story also preach the benefits of generosity while failing to practice
them in daily life. The parson Trulliber, who eats constantly without showing appreciation for his wife’s
cooking, is another religious man who talks about charity but doesn’t demonstrate it. Another
gentleman that Adams meets on the road outdoes Adams at his own game, promising Adams extensive
hospitality at his home—only to then come up with an excuse to back out of his promises at the last
minute. Notably, the pedlar, who is poor and has no religious education to speak of, is the most
generous character in the story, lending Adams some money, and later going out of his way to save the
life of Adams’s son, Dick. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding explores the difference between how religious
people claim to be and the degree to which they actually embody Christian values, suggesting that
virtues like charity are more often praised than practiced.

Symbols

Strawberry Mark

The strawberry mark on Joseph Andrews’s chest symbolizes the importance of heredity in 18th-century
Britain and how it defined a person’s social class, but it also perhaps provides some humorous
commentary on it. The mark plays an important role in the plot, as it confirms that Joseph is the
gentleman Wilson’s son. This is extremely important, because it gives Joseph the status to marry his true
love Fanny and to live comfortably with her. But there is also something funny about his birthmark
looking like a strawberry, rather than something more noble or majestic. A strawberry is a small fruit,
and the mark on Joseph is small, suggesting how, from an outside perspective, heredity and social status
might not be so significant, despite their massive significance to the events of the story.

Aeschylus

Parson Abraham Adams is known for always carrying around a book by the ancient Greek playwright
Aeschylus, which he’s had for 30 years. The book hints at Adams’s studious and bookish nature, but it
also symbolizes his hypocrisy, suggesting that Adams’s supposed love of education might be shallower
than it appears. Despite Adams’s great affection for Aeschylus, he doesn’t seem to read much outside of
Aeschylus, suggesting an unwillingness to branch out and seek a more well-rounded education. Adams
also hypocritically says that religious men have little to learn from plays, despite the fact that Aeschylus
is a playwright. This shows how, while Adams purports to believe in education and preaches about it, his
own education is selective and not always consistent. As is often the case, Adams finds it difficult to
practice what he preaches.

Adams’s book of Aeschylus meets its end when Adams gets distracted during Joseph Andrews and
Fanny’s reunion, and the book burns up. The burning of Aeschylus is ambiguous—on the one hand, it’s
yet another example of Adams’s absent-mindedness and carelessness. On the other hand, however,
perhaps the burning of Aeschylus represents a new start for Adams, since in the end, the best thing
Adams does as a preacher is to help bring about Joseph and Fanny’s wedding

Other Books Related to Joseph Andrews

The most important literary influence on Joseph Andrews is Pamela, a novel published two years earlier
by Samuel Richardson. That novel contains the character Pamela Andrews, who returns in Joseph
Andrews as the sister of the title character. But while Pamela was a model of virtue in Richardson’s
novel, she becomes something of a goody two-shoes in Fielding’s more satirical novel. Fielding also took
inspiration from earlier influences, such as the classical Greek poet Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey) and
particularly from the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, whose comic adventure novel Don Quixote
bears some similarities to the adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fielding is today considered one of the
most foundational English-language novelists, whose work helped the genre take shape.