Major Themes

The Vulnerability and Power of Goodness

Goodness was a preoccupation of the littérateurs of the eighteenth century no less than of the
moralists. In an age in which worldly authority was largely unaccountable and tended to be
corrupt, Fielding seems to have judged that temporal power was not compatible with goodness.
In his novels, most of the squires, magistrates, fashionable persons, and petty capitalists are
either morally ambiguous or actively predatory; by contrast, his paragon of benevolence, Parson
Adams, is quite poor and utterly dependent for his income on the patronage of squires. As a
corollary of this antithesis, Fielding shows that Adams's extreme goodness, one ingredient of
which is ingenuous expectation of goodness in others, makes him vulnerable to exploitation by
unscrupulous worldlings. Much as the novelist seems to enjoy humiliating his clergyman,
however, Adams remains a transcendently vital presence whose temporal weakness does not
invalidate his moral power. If his naïve good nature is no antidote to the evils of hypocrisy and
unprincipled self-interest, that is precisely because those evils are so pervasive; the
impracticality of his laudable principles is a judgment not on Adams nor on goodness per se but
on the world.
Charity and Religion
Fielding’s novels are full of clergymen, many of whom are less than exemplary; in the contrast
between the benevolent Adams and his more self-interested brethren, Fielding draws the
distinction between the mere formal profession of Christian doctrines and that active charity
which he considers true Christianity. Fielding advocated the expression of religious duty in
everyday human interactions: universal, disinterested compassion arises from the social
affections and manifests itself in general kindness to other people, relieving the afflictions and
advancing the welfare of mankind. One might say that Fielding’s religion focuses on morality
and ethics rather than on theology or forms of worship; as Adams says to the greedy and
uncharitable Parson Trulliber, “Whoever therefore is void of Charity, I make no scruple of
pronouncing that he is no Christian.”
Providence
If Fielding is skeptical about the efficacy of human goodness in the corrupt world, he is
nevertheless determined that it should always be recompensed; thus, when the "good"
characters of Adams, Joseph, and Fanny are helpless to engineer their own happiness, Fielding
takes care to engineer it for them. The role of the novelist thus becomes analogous to that of
God in the real world: he is a providential planner, vigilantly rewarding virtue and punishing
vice, and Fielding's overtly stylized plots and characterizations work to call attention to his
designing hand. The parallel between plot and providence does not imply, however, that
Fielding naïvely expects that good will always triumph over evil in real life; rather, as Judith
Hawley argues, "it implies that life is a work of art, a work of conscious design created by a
combination of Providential authorship and individual free will." Fielding's authorly concern for
his characters, then, is not meant to encourage his readers in their everyday lives to wait on the
favor of a divine author; it should rather encourage them to make an art out of the business of
living by advancing and perfecting the work of providence, that is, by living according to the
true Christian principles of active benevolence.
Town and Country Fielding did not choose the direction and destination of his hero’s travels
at random; Joseph moves from the town to the country in order to illustrate, in the words of
Martin C. Battestin, “a moral pilgrimage from the vanity and corruption of the Great City to the
relative naturalness and simplicity of the country.” Like Mr. Wilson (albeit without having sunk
nearly so low), Joseph develops morally by leaving the city, site of vanity and superficial
pleasures, for the country, site of virtuous retirement and contented domesticity. Not that
Fielding had any utopian illusions about the countryside; the many vicious characters whom
Joseph and Adams meet on the road home attest that Fielding believed human nature to be
basically consistent across geographic distinctions. His claim for rural life derives from the
pragmatic judgment that, away from the bustle, crime, and financial pressures of the city, those
who are so inclined may, as Battestin puts it, “attend to the basic values of life.”
Affectation, Vanity, and Hypocrisy
Fielding’s Preface declares that the target of his satire is the ridiculous, that “the only Source of
the true Ridiculous” is affectation, and that “Affectation proceeds from one of these two
Causes, Vanity, or Hypocrisy.” Hypocrisy, being the dissimulation of true motives, is the more
dangerous of these causes: whereas the vain man merely considers himself better than he is, the
hypocrite pretends to be other than he is. Thus, Mr. Adams is vain about his learning, his
sermons, and his pedagogy, but while this vanity may occasionally make him ridiculous, it
remains entirely or virtually harmless. By contrast, Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop counterfeit
virtue in order to prey on Joseph, Parson Trulliber counterfeits moral authority in order to keep
his parish in awe, Peter Pounce counterfeits contented poverty in order to exploit the financial
vulnerabilities of other servants, and so on. Fielding chose to combat these two forms of
affectation, the harmless and the less harmless, by poking fun at them, on the theory that humor
is more likely than invective to encourage people to remedy their flaws.
Chastity
As his broad hints about Joseph and Fanny’s euphoric wedding night suggest, Fielding has a
fundamentally positive attitude toward sex; he does prefer, however, that people’s sexual
conduct be in accordance with what they owe to God, each other, and themselves. In the mutual
attraction of Joseph and Fanny there is nothing licentious or exploitative, and they demonstrate
the virtuousness of their love in their eagerness to undertake a lifetime commitment and in their
compliance with the Anglican forms regulating marriage, which require them to delay the event
to which they have been looking forward for years. If Fielding approves of Joseph and Fanny,
though, he does not take them too seriously; in particular, Joseph’s “male-chastity” is somewhat
incongruous given the sexual double-standard, and Fielding is not above playing it for laughs,
particularly while the hero is in London. Even militant chastity is vastly preferable, however, to
the loveless and predatory sexuality of Lady Booby and those like her: as Martin C. Battestin
argues, “Joseph’s chastity is amusing because extreme; but it functions nonetheless as a
wholesome antithesis to the fashionable lusts and intrigues of high society.”
Class and Birth
Joseph Andrews is full of class distinctions and concerns about high and low birth, but Fielding
is probably less interested in class difference per se than in the vices it can engender, such as
corruption and affectation. Naturally, he disapproves of those who pride themselves on their
class status to the point of deriding or exploiting those of lower birth: Mrs. Grave-airs, who
turns her nose up at Joseph, and Beau Didapper, who believes he has a social prerogative to
prey on Fanny sexually, are good examples of these vices. Fielding did not consider class
privileges to be evil in themselves; rather, he seems to have believed that some people deserve
social ascendancy while others do not. This view of class difference is evident in his use of the
romance convention whereby the plot turns on the revelation of the hero’s true birth and
ancestry, which is more prestigious than everyone had thought. Fielding, then, is conservative
in the sense that he aligns high class status with moral worth; this move amounts not so much to
an endorsement of the class system as to a taking it for granted, an acceptance of class terms for
the expression of human value.
Joseph Andrews Summary
Joseph Andrews, a handsome young footman in the household of Sir Thomas Booby, has
attracted the erotic interest of his master’s wife, Lady Booby. He has also been noticed by the
parson of the parish, Mr. Abraham Adams, who wishes to cultivate Joseph’s moral and
intellectual potential. Before he can start Joseph on a course of Latin instruction, however, the
Boobys depart the country for London, taking Joseph with them.

In London, Joseph falls in with a fast crowd of urban footmen, but despite his rakish peers and
the insinuations of the libidinous Lady Booby he remains uncorrupted. After a year or so Sir
Thomas dies, leaving his widow free to make attempts on the footman’s virtue. Joseph fails to
respond to her amorous hints, however, because he is too naïve to understand them; in a letter to
his sister Pamela, he indicates his belief that no woman of Lady Booby’s social stature could
possibly be attracted to a mere servant. Soon Joseph endures and rebuffs another, less subtle
attempt at seduction by Lady Booby’s waiting-gentlewoman, the middle-aged and hideous Mrs.
Slipslop.
Lady Booby sends for Joseph and tries again to beguile him, to no avail. His virtue infuriates
her, so she sends him away again, resolved to terminate his employment. She then suffers
agonies of indecision over whether to retain Joseph or not, but eventually Joseph receives his
wages and his walking papers from the miserly steward, Peter Pounce. The former footman is
actually relieved to have been dismissed, because he now believes his mistress to be both
lascivious and psychologically unhinged.
Joseph sets out for the Boobys’ country parish, where he will reunite with his childhood
sweetheart and now fiancée, the illiterate milkmaid Fanny Goodwill. On his first night out, he
runs into Two Ruffians who beat, strip, and rob him and leave him in a ditch to die. Soon a
stage-coach approaches, full of hypocritical and self-interested passengers who only admit
Joseph into the coach when a lawyer among them argues that they may be liable for Joseph’s
death if they make no effort to help him and he dies. The coach takes Joseph and the other
passengers to an inn, where the chamber-maid, Betty, cares for him and a Surgeon pronounces
his injuries likely mortal.
Joseph defies the Surgeon’s prognosis the next day, receiving a visit from Mr. Barnabas the
clergyman and some wretched hospitality from Mrs. Tow-wouse, the wife of the innkeeper.
Soon another clergyman arrives at the inn and turns out to be Mr. Adams, who is on his way to
London to attempt to publish several volumes of his sermons. Joseph is thrilled to see him, and
Adams treats his penniless protégé to several meals. Adams is not flush with cash himself,
however, and he soon finds himself trying unsuccessfully to get a loan from Mr. Tow-wouse
with a volume of his sermons as security. Soon Mr. Barnabas, hearing that Adams is a
clergyman, introduces him to a Bookseller who might agree to represent him in the London
publishing trade. The Bookseller is not interested in marketing sermons, however, and soon the
fruitless discussion is interrupted by an uproar elsewhere in the inn, as Betty the chambermaid,
having been rejected by Joseph, has just been discovered in bed with Mr. Tow-wouse.
Mr. Adams ends up getting a loan from a servant from a passing coach, and he and Joseph are
about to part ways when he discovers that he has left his sermons at home and thus has no
reason to go to London. Adams and Joseph decide to take turns riding Adams’s horse on their
journey home, and after a rocky start they are well on their way, with Adams riding in a stage-
coach and Joseph riding the horse. In the coach Mr. Adams listens avidly to a gossipy tale about
a jilted woman named Leonora; at the next inn he and Joseph get into a brawl with an insulting
innkeeper and his wife. When they depart the inn, with Joseph in the coach and Adams
theoretically on horseback, the absent-minded Adams unfortunately forgets about the horse and
ends up going on foot.
On his solitary walk, Adams encounters a Sportsman who is out shooting partridge and who
boasts of the great value he places on bravery. When the sound of a woman’s cries reaches
them, however, the Sportsman flees with his gun, leaving Adams to rescue the woman from her
assailant. The athletic Adams administers a drubbing so thorough that he fears he has killed the
attacker. When a group of young men comes by, however, the assailant suddenly recovers and
accuses Adams and the woman of robbing and beating him. The young men lay hold of Adams
and the woman and drag them to the Justice of the Peace, hoping to get a reward for turning
them in. On the way Mr. Adams and the woman discover that they know each other: she is
Joseph’s beloved, Fanny Goodwill, who set out to find Joseph when she heard of his
unfortunate encounter with the Ruffians.
The Justice of the Peace is negligent and is about to commit Adams and Fanny to prison
without giving their case much thought when suddenly a bystander recognizes Adams and
vouches for him as a clergyman and a gentleman. The Justice readily reverses himself and
dismisses the charges against Adams and Fanny, though the assailant has already slipped away
and will not be held accountable. Soon Adams and Fanny depart for the next inn, where they
expect to meet Joseph.
Joseph and Fanny have a joyous reunion at the inn, and Joseph wishes to get married then and
there; both Mr. Adams and Fanny, however, prefer a more patient approach. In the morning the
companions discover that they have another inn bill that they cannot pay, so Adams goes off in
search of the wealthy parson of the parish. Parson Trulliber, who spends most of his time
tending his hogs rather than tending souls, reacts badly to Adams’s request for charity. Adams
returns to the inn with nothing to show for his efforts, but fortunately a generous Pedlar hears of
the travelers’ predicament and loans Adams the money he needs.
After a couple more miles on the road, the travelers encounter a gregarious Squire who offers
them generous hospitality and the use of his coach but then retracts these offers at the last
minute. Adams discusses this strange behavior with the innkeeper, who tells him about the
Squire’s long history of making false promises.
Walking on after nightfall, the companions encounter a group of spectral lights that Mr. Adams
takes to be ghosts but that turn out later to be the lanterns of sheep-stealers. The companions
flee the scene and find accommodations at the home of a family named Wilson. After the
women have retired for the evening, Mr. Adams and Joseph sit up to hear Mr. Wilson tell his
life story, which is approximately the story of a “rake’s progress” redeemed by the love of a
good woman. Wilson also mentions that since moving from London to the country, he and his
wife have lost their eldest son to a gypsy abduction.
The travelers, who are quite won over by the Wilson family and their simple country life, depart
in the morning. As they walk along, Mr. Adams and Joseph discuss Wilson’s biography and
debate the origins of human virtue and vice. Eventually they stop to take a meal, and while they
are resting, a pack of hunting dogs comes upon them, annihilates a defenseless hare, and then
attacks the sleeping Mr. Adams. Joseph and his cudgel come to the parson’s defense, laying
waste to the pack of hounds. The owner of the hounds, a sadistic Squire whom Fielding labels a
“Hunter of Men,” is at first inclined to be angry about the damage to his dogs, but as soon as he
sees the lovely Fanny he changes his plans and invites the companions to his house for dinner.
The Hunter of Men and his retinue of grotesques taunt Mr. Adams throughout dinner,
prompting the parson to fetch Joseph and Fanny from the kitchen and leave the house. The
Hunter sends his servants after them with orders to abduct Fanny, whom he has been planning
all along to debauch. The servants find the companions at an inn the next morning, and after
another epic battle they succeed in tying Adams and Joseph to a bedpost and making off with
Fanny. Luckily for Fanny, however, a group of Lady Booby’s servants come along, recognize
the milkmaid, and rescue her from her captors. They then proceed to the inn where Adams and
Joseph are tied up, and Joseph gets to take out his frustrations on Fanny’s primary captor before
they all set off again. Mr. Adams rides in a coach with the obnoxious Peter Pounce, who so
insults the parson that he eventually gets out of the coach and walks beside Joseph and Fanny’s
horse for the last mile of the journey.
The companions finally arrive home in Lady Booby’s parish, and Lady Booby herself arrives
shortly thereafter. At church on Sunday she hears Mr. Adams announce the wedding banns of
Joseph and Fanny, and later in the day she summons the parson for a browbeating. She claims
to oppose the marriage of the young lovers on the grounds that they will raise a family of
beggars in the parish. When Adams refuses to cooperate with Lady Booby’s efforts to keep the
lovers apart, Lady Booby summons a lawyer named Scout, who trumps up a legal pretext for
preventing the marriage. Two days later Joseph and Fanny are brought before the Justice of the
Peace, who is perfectly willing to acquiesce in Lady Booby’s plans.
The arrival of Lady Booby’s nephew, Mr. Booby, and his new wife, who happens to be
Joseph’s sister Pamela, thwarts the legal proceedings. Mr. Booby, not wanting anything to upset
his young wife, intervenes in the case and springs her brother and Fanny. He then takes Joseph
back to Booby Hall, while Fanny proceeds to the Adams home. The next day Lady Booby
convinces Mr. Booby to join in her effort to dissuade Joseph from marrying Fanny. Meanwhile,
Fanny takes a walk near Booby Hall and endures an assault by a diminutive gentleman named
Beau Didapper; when the Beau fails to have his way with Fanny, he delegates the office to a
servant and walks off. Fortunately, Joseph intervenes before the servant can get very far.
Joseph and Fanny arrive at the Adams home, where Mr. Adams counsels Joseph to be moderate
and rational in his attachment to his future wife. Just as Adams finishes his recommendation of
stoical detachment, someone arrives to tell him that his youngest son, Dick, has just drowned in
the river. Mr. Adams, not so detached, weeps copiously for his son, who fortunately comes
running up to the house before long, having been rescued from the river by the same Pedlar who
earlier redeemed the travelers from one of their inns. Adams rejoices and once again thanks the
Pedlar, then resumes counseling Joseph to avoid passionate attachments. Joseph attempts to
point out to Adams his own inconsistency, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, Lady Booby is plotting to use Beau Didapper to come between Joseph and Fanny.
She takes him, along with Mr. Booby and Pamela, to the Adams household, where the Beau
attempts to fondle Fanny and incurs the wrath of Joseph. When the assembled Boobys suggest
to Joseph that he is wasting his time on the milkmaid, Joseph departs with his betrothed, vowing
to have nothing more to do with any relations who will not accept Fanny.
Joseph, Fanny, the Pedlar, and the Adamses all dine together at an alehouse that night. There,
the Pedlar reveals that he has discovered that Fanny is in fact the long-lost daughter of Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews, which would make her the sister of Joseph and thereby not eligible to be his
wife. Back at Booby Hall, Lady Booby rejoices to learn that Joseph and Fanny have been
discovered to be siblings. Everyone then gathers at the Hall, where Mr. Booby advises everyone
to remain calm and withhold judgment until the next day, when Mr. and Mrs. Andrews will
arrive and presumably will clear things up.
Late that night, hi-jinx ensue as Beau Didapper seeks Fanny’s bed but ends up in Mrs.
Slipslop’s. Slipslop screams for help, bringing Mr. Adams, who mistakenly attacks Slipslop
while the Beau gets away. Lady Booby then arrives to find Adams and Slipslop in bed together,
but the confusion dissipates before long and Adams makes his way back toward his room.
Unfortunately, a wrong turn brings him to Fanny’s room, where he sleeps until morning, when
Joseph discovers the parson and the milkmaid in bed together. After being briefly angry, Joseph
concludes that Adams simply made a wrong turn in the night.
Once Adams has left them alone, the apparent siblings vow that if they turn out really to be
siblings, they will both remain perpetually celibate. Later that morning Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
arrive, and soon it emerges that Fanny is indeed their daughter, stolen from her cradle; what
also emerges, however, is that Joseph is not really their son but the changeling baby they
received in place of Fanny. The Pedlar suddenly thinks of the Wilson family, who long ago lost
a child with a distinctive birth-mark on his chest, and it so happens that Joseph bears just such a
distinctive birth-mark. Mr. Wilson himself is luckily coming through the gate of Booby Hall at
that very moment, so the reunion between father and son takes place on the spot.
Everyone except Lady Booby then proceeds to Mr. Booby’s country estate, and on the ride over
Joseph and Fanny make their wedding arrangements. After the wedding, the newlyweds settle
near the Wilsons. Mr. Booby dispenses a small fortune to Fanny, a valuable clerical living to
Mr. Adams, and a job as excise-man to the Pedlar. Lady Booby returns to a life of flirtation in
London.
Preface and Book I, Chapters I through VI
Summary.
Preface.
Fielding defines and defends his chosen genre, the comic epic, or “comic Epic-Poem in Prose.”
Claiming a lost work of Homer as precedent, he explains that the comic epic differs from
comedy in having more “comprehensive” action and a greater variety of incidents and
characters; it differs from the “serious Romance” in having lower-class characters and favoring,
in “Sentiments and Diction,” the ridiculous over the sublime. Fielding is particularly concerned
to differentiate the comic epic, and comedy generally, from burlesque: “no two Species of
Writing can differ more widely than the Comic and the Burlesque,” for while the writer of
burlesque depicts “the monstrous,” the writer of comedy depicts “the ridiculous.” “The
Ridiculous only . . . falls within my Province in the present Work,” and Fielding accordingly
goes on to define it. “The only Source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is
Affectation,” to which Fielding assigns two possible causes, “Vanity, or Hypocrisy.” Vanity is
affecting to be better than one is: the vain man either lacks the virtue or quality he claims to
have, or else he claims to possess it in a greater degree than he actually does. By contrast,
hypocrisy is affecting to be other than one is: the hypocritical man “is the very Reverse of what
he would seem to be,” and Fielding gives the example of a greedy man pretending to be
generous. The ridiculous arises from the discovery of affectation, and as hypocrisy is a more
egregious form of affectation than is vanity, so, says Fielding, the sense of the ridiculous arising
from its discovery will be stronger than in the case of vanity.

Fielding anticipates the criticism that, in addition to affectation, he has given a great deal of
space in the novel to “Vices, and of a very black Kind.” Vices, which inspire moral revulsion
rather than amusement, are not the stuff of comedy. Fielding acknowledges the presence of
vices in his story but offers several mitigating considerations, among which is the fact that they
are not very potent, “never produc[ing] the intended Evil.”
Finally, Fielding addresses the characters of the novel, claiming that all are drawn from life and
that he has made certain alterations in order to obscure their true identities. Fielding also
conciliates his clerical readers by emphasizing that the curate Mr. Abraham Adams, though he
participates in a number of low incidents, is a credit to the cloth due to his great simplicity and
benevolence.
Chapter I.
Fielding justifies the moral agenda of his novel by observing that “Examples work more
forcibly on the Mind than Precepts.” Inspiring stories about virtuous figures will have a better
moral effect than the recital of maxims, because in them “Delight is mixed with Instruction, and
the Reader is almost as much improved as entertained.”
As instances of the positive moral influence of written accounts of exemplars of virtue, Fielding
cites two recent publications, in both cases sarcastically. The first is Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela (1740), an epistolary novel about a virtuous maid-servant; Fielding detested the novel
and the moral system implicit in it, and both Joseph Andrews and his previous effort in fiction,
Shamela, are spoofs of Richardson’s novel. The second is the Apology for the Life of Colley
Cibber (1740), the autobiography of the scantly talented Poet Laureate who was despised by
Fielding, Alexander Pope, and almost every other contemporary writer of note.
Chapter II.
Fielding introduces “Mr. Joseph Andrews, the Hero of our ensuing History.” Joey, as Fielding
and his characters call the hero at this stage of the narrative, is the son of the low-born Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews and the brother of Pamela Andrews, the fictive heroine of Samuel Richardson’s
famous novel. Fielding confesses that, despite his best genealogical efforts, he has been unable
to discover the ancestry of the Andrews family. Jokingly, he asks the reader to contemplate the
possibility that the Andrews family has no ancestors at all, though of course they must be
descended from someone. Fielding is satirizing the social convention whereby only families of
high standing are considered to be “families” in the proper and exalted sense; accordingly, a
person who lacks ancestors of note is said, in this snobbish idiom, to lack ancestors altogether.
From his comment on the arbitrary nature of social distinctions, Fielding goes on to argue for
the suitability of Joey as a hero: “Would it not be hard, that a Man who hath no Ancestors
should therefore be render’d incapable of acquiring Honour, when we see so many who have no
Virtues, enjoying the Honour of their Forefathers?”
Fielding summarizes Joey’s early biography. At age ten he went to work in the household of Sir
Thomas Booby, his initial job being to scare birds; he failed at this task, however, because his
sweet voice tended rather to attract them. His second job was to keep Sir Thomas’s hounds in
line with a whip, but he failed at this task for a similar reason. His third job was to ride Sir
Thomas’s horses in races, which task he performed so well through his combination of
athleticism and invulnerability to corruption that Lady Booby noticed him and, when he was
seventeen, began to employ him as a footman. Joey’s new responsibilities involved attending
Lady Booby everywhere, including at church, where his singing voice and general good
conduct attracted the notice of the curate, Mr. Adams.
Chapter III.
Fielding introduces Mr. Abraham Adams, who besides being a clergyman is a master of several
tongues both ancient and modern and who exemplifies ingenuous good nature: “He was
generous, friendly and brave to an Excess; but Simplicity was his Characteristic.” He is fifty
years old, and his income does not go far in providing for his wife and six children.
Mr. Adams quizzes Joey on his knowledge of the Bible and, in answer to a series of questions,
learns that Joey has had some formal education but is largely an autodidact. Mr. Adams, finding
Joey so deserving of cultivation, attempts to secure Lady Booby’s permission to tutor him in
Latin, “by which means he might be qualified for a higher Station than that of Footman.” Lady
Booby will not deign to speak with the curate, however, and Mr. Adams must deal with Mrs.
Slipslop, her ladyship’s pretentious waiting-gentlewoman. Mrs. Slipslop informs Mr. Adams
that the Boobys are soon to depart for London and that Lady Booby will not wish to leave her
footman behind to receive Latin instruction. The family leaves within a few days, taking Joey
with them, but not before the latter has thanked Mr. Adams for his consideration of him.
Chapter IV.
In London, Joey falls under the influence of the big-city footmen, who succeed in getting him to
change his hair but fail to make him pick up any of their vices. He spends most of his free time
on music, about which subject he becomes very learned. He becomes less obviously devoted to
his religion, but “his Morals remained entirely uncorrupted.” Lady Booby now flirts incessantly
with him and seeks opportunities of leaning on his arm when he accompanies her on her walks.
Other ladies in town begin to gossip about Lady Booby and her footman. The footman himself
remains oblivious to the gossip and to his lady’s intentions, and Lady Booby finds that his
restraint makes him even more attractive.
Chapter V.
Sir Thomas Booby dies, and Lady Booby accordingly confines herself to her room, ostensibly
to mourn his passing but really to play cards. On the seventh day of her “mourning” she sends
for Joey and hints around at her amorous intentions. When he does not catch her drift, she
“accidentally” exposes her neck but fails to produce the desired result. When Lady Booby
pretends to worry whether it is safe for her to be alone in her bedroom with Joey, he vows that
he would “rather die a thousand Deaths” than commit any sexual transgression. Lady Booby
finally dismisses him in frustration.
Chapter VI.
Joseph writes a letter to his sister Pamela, reporting on the strange behavior of Lady Booby
since the death of Sir Thomas. He attributes her baffling conduct to grief over the loss of her
husband, despite the fact that he always thought that they did not like each other. He then
recounts the incident in Lady Booby’s bedroom, remarking that “if it had not been so great a
Lady, I should have thought she had had a mind to me.” Joseph anticipates losing his place soon
because of this falling-out, and in any case he does not wish to remain in her employ if she is
going to continue to be psychologically unstable.
After finishing this letter, Joseph walks downstairs and comes upon the hideous Mrs. Slipslop,
whose physical person Fielding describes in some detail. Like her mistress, Mrs. Slipslop is
strongly attracted to Joseph, and she has tried in the past to entice him with “Tea, Sweetmeats,
Wine, and many other Delicacies.” Now Joseph accepts her offer of a glass of cordial, and they
sit down together for a chat. Mrs. Slipslop suggest that Joseph has been ungrateful in failing to
return her affections; Joseph denies this charge, angering Mrs. Slipslop, who springs at him
with the intention of satisfying her lust and wrath. Lady Booby rings the bell, however, in time
to deliver Joseph from the clutches of the waiting-gentlewoman.
Analysis.
The Preface makes clear that while Fielding's outlook is undoubtedly comic, his comic writing
nevertheless has a serious point. Fielding rejects the genre of conventional romance because it
contains "very little instruction or entertainment," whereas Fielding's twofold goal is precisely
to instruct and entertain. The notion that good art is "utile et dulce," both useful and sweet,
educational and enjoyable, comes from the Roman poet Horace, an authoritative source of
classical thinking on the purposes of art. Fielding makes ironic reference to Horace in Chapter I
when, having listed a number of popular tales available in cheap pamphlet form, he remarks, "In
all these, Delight is mixed with Instruction, and the Reader is almost as much improved as
entertained." The target of his irony here is not the classical principle itself but the modern
works that fail to live up to that principle. In outlining his own "utile et dulce" approach to the
novel, Fielding rejects burlesque and caricature because he wants to inspire laughter not for its
own sake but constructively, with humor being the vehicle of moral commentary. His target,
therefore, will not be "what is monstrous and unnatural," what never really occurs in life and
thus, in being exposed, cannot edify readers; rather, he will "confine [himself] strictly to
Nature," exposing "the true Ridiculous" as it exists in everyday life, thereby performing a
corrective function for the morals of the age.
In Fielding's analysis, the outstanding moral fault of the day -- the fault which is consequently
the outstanding preoccupation of Fielding's writing -- is "Affectation," the "only source of the
true Ridiculous." Affectation comes in two forms: the Affectation that arises from Vanity and
the Affectation that arises from Hypocrisy. Fielding treats the latter as the more dangerous flaw,
because when hypocrites conceal their true motives and attitudes, they may deceive other
people, sometimes to very serious effect. Fielding seeks to oppose the forces of affectation by
making vain and hypocritical people seem ridiculous, and he executes this project by employing
a kind of humor that encourages solidarity among readers, who are implicitly assumed to be on
Fielding's side. In inspiring readers to laugh at affected people, Fielding insinuates that society
breaks down into two camps, the affected and the genuine, and his moralizing humor supplies
readers with incentives, mainly a string of jokes and a sense of moral superiority, to join (or
remain on) the side of the genuine. This literary program effectively exempts readers from
Fielding's criticism, and one may validly object to it on the grounds that it actually encourages
moral complacency on the part of readers, allowing them to feel that they confirm their own
righteousness simply by laughing at others. Ironically, this sort of moral laziness would itself be
a form of affectation.
Fielding soon presents two paragons of hypocrisy in Lady Booby and her servant and imitator
Mrs. Slipslop. Lady Booby dissembles her motives continually, for example in walking out with
Joseph: supposedly, she sees “the Effects which Town-Air hath on the soberest Constitutions,”
so she heads to Hyde Park with her handsome footman, whose arm she will naturally require as
support. More serious is her conduct following the death of her husband. Fielding’s manner of
announcing Sir Thomas’s death is immensely clever: “At this Time, an Accident happened
which put a stop to these agreeable Walks, . . . and this was no other than the death of Sir
Thomas Booby, who departing this Life, left his disconsolate Lady confined to her House.” By
killing off Sir Thomas in a subordinate clause, Fielding insinuates that Sir Thomas’s living or
dying is of merely secondary importance to his own wife, who considers his departure from this
life only in terms of its effects on her, since it compels her to stay indoors for a period of ritual
mourning. Thus, the reader understands “disconsolate” in a sarcastic sense even before learning
that Lady Booby’s visitors consoled the bereaved widow with card games and before
witnessing the ease with which she rebounds and attempts to acquire a new bed-mate.
Mrs. Sliplsop takes after her mistress both in her passion for Joseph and in her attempts to
appear other than she is. In a helpfully literal moment in Chapter III, Fielding shows the simple
and trusting Mr. Adams unable to understand the pretentious Slipslop, that "mighty Affecter of
hard Words"; in a parallel moment in Chapter V, Joseph fails to understand the sexual
suggestions of Lady Booby. Both Mr. Adams and Joseph are too trusting and deferential to
react properly to the tortured relationships between appearance and reality: the learned Adams
recognizes Slipslop's coinages as solecisms, but his ingenuous respect for her gentility abashes
him into complicity with her pretensions; similarly, Joseph has seen enough of the world (or at
least of London) that the evidences of Lady Booby's libido are not totally baffling to him, and
yet his reverence for her exalted status causes him to lose the thread: “if it had not been so great
a Lady, I should have thought she had had a mind to me.” Both Lady Booby and Sliplsop have
a mind to him, of course, and Fielding clearly intends their rivalry to be the source of much
humor: the incongruity of so much sexual vigor animating Slipslop’s homely postmenopausal
body is, in Fielding's view, not only funny in itself but funny in relation to the passion of Lady
Booby. The fact is that Lady Booby, though possessing so many seeming advantages (of status,
comparative youth, and presumably beauty) over her waiting-gentlewoman, in fact has no better
chance with the footman.
The character of Joseph has been a stumbling-block to many modern readers for whom sexual
purity may not seem intrinsically valuable, and the extent to which Fielding intended even
eighteenth-century readers to take his title character seriously is a matter for debate. The
character of Joseph has a serious precedent in the Book of Genesis, in which his namesake is
sold as a slave to the house of Potiphar and rebuffs heroically the sexual advances of Potiphar's
wife; Joseph also, however, has a precedent in contemporary English literature, namely Samuel
Richardson's Pamela Andrews, whom Fielding has made into Joseph's sister and idol. Fielding
detested Richardson's novel and its heroine, so that insofar as Joseph functions as a stand-in for
Richardson's Pamela, Fielding almost certainly intended him and his virtue to be risible. As
Maurice Johnson comments, there is undeniably something absurd about "a squeamish male
Pamela, strong, handsome, and twenty-one," and yet the actual humor value of Joseph's defense
of his virtue tends to arise mostly from the miscalculations and psychological turmoil of Lady
Booby and the low comedy of the vulgar Slipslop. As the story moves away from the voracious
London ladies to follow Joseph on his quest for home, Joseph's virtue will seem less absurd, in
part because Joseph will have less cause to be squeamish. Crucially, however, what will
become apparent is that Joseph's virtue, unlike that of Lady Booby, is in no way affected: he is
motivated not by a desire to appear virtuous to others but by a determination to remain loyal to
his beloved Fanny Goodwill.
Book I, Chapters VII through XII.
Summary.
Chapter VII.
Fielding presents “the different Operations of this Passion of Love in the gentle and cultivated
Mind of the Lady Booby, from those which it effected in the less polished and coarser
Disposition of Mrs. Slipslop.” Lady Booby, ashamed of her passion for Joseph Andrews and
detesting Joseph for having aroused it, determines to dismiss him from her service. She rings
for Slipslop and confers with her regarding Joseph’s character. They both agree that he is “a
wild young Fellow,” with Slipslop accusing him of all the usual vices, including that of having
impregnated the chambermaid. Lady Booby sends Slipslop out of the room with an order to
dismiss Joseph; she quickly calls Slipslop back, however, and reverses the order, then changes
her mind a couple more times before finally resolving “to see the Boy, and examine him
herself” and then send him away for good. While Lady Booby prepares for “this last View of
Joseph (for that she was most certainly resolved it should be),” Fielding apostrophizes Love,
complaining of its power to make people deceive themselves.

Chapter VIII.
Fielding requests the reader’s sympathy on behalf of Lady Booby, pleading as an extenuating
circumstance the great physical beauty of Joseph Andrews, which Fielding now describes in
some detail. Joseph is now twenty-one years old and possessed of “an Air, which to those who
have not seen many Noblemen, would give an Idea of Nobility.”
Joseph appears in all his splendor before Lady Booby, who accuses him of all the vices Mrs.
Slipslop attributed to him. Joseph is taken aback and insists that he has “never offended more
than Kissing.” Lady Booby, having observed that kissing often leads to other activities, asks
him: “[I]f I should admit you to such Freedom, what would you think of me?” When Joseph
resists all her insinuations, she demands to know what standing he has, as her social inferior, to
insist upon his own virtue when she has cast aside her own. Joseph replies that he cannot see
“why, because I am a Man, or because I am poor, my Virtue should be subservient to [a lady’s]
Pleasure.” Lady Booby finally loses all patience when Joseph makes reference to the virtuous
example of his sister, Pamela Andrews, who has endured the lascivious attentions of Sir
Thomas’s nephew while a maid-servant in his household. She dismisses Joseph in a rage and
then rings for Mrs. Slipslop.
Chapter IX.
Lady Booby orders Slipslop, who was listening at the door, to have the steward pay Joseph his
wages and send him away. Slipslop opines that if she had known how Lady Booby would react,
she would never have reported Joseph’s behavior. After sending Slipslop out of the room and
then calling her back again, Lady Booby censures her for impertinence, whereupon Slipslop
says darkly, “I know what I know.” Lady Booby promptly fires her, and Slipslop departs the
room, slamming the door behind her. Lady Booby then begins to worry about her reputation,
which she perceives is in the hands of Slipslop, who no longer has any incentive to be discreet;
after a time she calls Slipslop back again and reinstates her. She still regrets, however, that “her
dear Reputation was in the power of her Servants,” both Slipslop and Joseph; worse still is the
fact that “in reality she had not so entirely conquered her Passion,” so that she still vacillates
regarding whether or not to reinstate Joseph.
Chapter X.
Joseph, who now understands “the Drift of his Mistress,” composes a letter to his sister Pamela.
In it he reflects on a lesson of Mr. Abraham Adams, “that Chastity is as great a Virtue in a Man
as in a Woman,” and attributes his own dedication to virtue to Mr. Adams’s guidance and
Pamela’s letters. He marvels, “What fine things are good Advice and good Examples!”
Before he has finished his letter, Lady Booby’s steward, Mr. Peter Pounce, summons him to
receive his wages. Pounce has made a lucrative racket out of holding back the servants’ wages,
advancing them the wages he has held back, and charging outrageous interest on the money he
has advanced. Joseph, in order to acquire musical instruments, has had to ask Pounce for
advances, and his wages are much diminished as a result. He borrows some clothes from
another servant, since he must leave his livery behind, and sets out at seven o’clock in the
evening.
Chapter XI.
Joseph heads not to his parents’ home, nor even to his sister Pamela’s, but back to Lady
Booby’s country seat, where he will reunite with his sweetheart, Fanny Goodwill. Joseph and
Fanny have known each other since early life and have long desired to marry, though they have
taken Mr. Adams’s advice in putting off the day until “a few Years Service and Thrift” will
have augmented both their experience and their finances. In the past year they have not
corresponded with each other, for the very good reason that Fanny is illiterate.
A hailstorm forces Joseph to take shelter at an inn with a lion on its sign-post and a master
named Timotheus. While Joseph is waiting for the storm to pass, another traveller enters the
inn, and Joseph recognizes him as the servant of a neighbor of Sir Thomas. Once the storm has
abated, Joseph and this traveller set out together.
Chapter XII.
Joseph and his companion reach another inn at about two o’clock in the morning; the other man
stays at the inn for the night, while Joseph proceeds on foot. Before long Two Ruffians confront
him in a narrow lane and demand his money. When Joseph asks to be able to keep a few
shillings, they demand his clothes as well; when he objects that the clothes belong to a friend of
his, they attack him with pistol and stick. Joseph takes care of the stick handily but receives a
blow on the head from the pistol. The Ruffians go on beating the senseless Joseph, strip him
naked, and leave him for dead.
Joseph regains consciousness just as a stage-coach approaches. The postillion hears Joseph’s
groans, and the coach stops, whereupon the passengers begin to debate whether or not to aid the
injured man. A young lawyer advises helping him in order that none of the passengers should
be liable for negligence. Other passengers resist this advice, but the lawyer eventually prevails.
Joseph, however, perceives that there are ladies in the coach and refuses to approach unless
someone gives him “sufficient Covering, to prevent giving the least Offense to Decency.” No
one wants to lend a garment to Joseph, until the Postilion finally volunteers his great-coat.
The Two Ruffians stop the coach and demand the passengers’ money, which they promptly
receive. As the coach moves on, one of the gentlemen lightens the mood by telling dirty jokes
that offend no one but Joseph. They arrive at an inn, where Betty the servant-maid prepares a
bed for him. The coachman fetches a Surgeon who, upon learning that Joseph is “a poor foot
Passenger” and not a gentleman, goes back to bed.
In the morning the master of the inn, Mr. Tow-wouse, orders Betty to give Joseph one of Mr.
Tow-wouse’s own shirts. Mrs. Tow-wouse objects to this proceeding, however, and upbraids
both her husband and the servant-girl. While Mr. and Mrs. Tow-wouse are arguing, Betty give
Joseph a shirt belonging to the Hostler, who is one of her sweethearts. The Surgeon also visits
Joseph and pronounces his wounds likely mortal.
Analysis.
If Fielding’s universe is a providential one, the society that he depicts is incongruously violent.
Joseph’s journey out of London soon brings him into contact with two savage highwaymen, but
ferocity exists even in the household of Lady Booby. Fielding suggests an element of violence
in Lady Booby’s feelings for Joseph: she flies “into a violent Passion” when ordering him to
leave her room, then wonders aloud, “Whither does this violent Passion hurry us?,” then rings
the bell for Slipslop “with infinite more Violence than was necessary.” She swerves between
extremes of emotion, and this emotional volatility arises, like other manifestations of violence,
from her high social status. As Hamilton Macallister observes, Lady Booby may do almost
anything she wants -- except marry Joseph, because to do so would be beneath her. Unable,
therefore, to reconcile what she wants with what she is, she experiences desire as degradation,
with a consequent impulse to punish both herself and the object of her desire. Thus follows, in
Macallister’s words, “the whole gamut of the passions: pride followed by contempt, disdain,
hatred of Joseph, revenge.” Lady Booby indeed endures more intense and protracted emotional
pain than any other character in the book, and Fielding presents her pain in detail; yet the novel
does not encourage sympathy for Lady Booby, and indeed virtually no readers feel any. She is a
personality spoiled by privilege: as her status is unconditional, her power is irresponsible; her
inability (or refusal) to control her emotions results from her exemption from accountability
and, being a function of her selfishness, does not call forth sympathy.
Mrs. Slipslop has violent hankerings as well, and they emerge most obviously in the famous
mock-epic simile in which Fielding compares her to “a hungry Tygress” craving the “Lamb”
Joseph. Fielding thus makes Slipslop’s violent tendencies more explicit than Lady Booby’s, but
interestingly, one of the effects of this explicitness is to make Slipslop seem less threatening
than her mistress. The mock-epic simile is inherently belittling, as the burlesque diction
measures the distance between the heroic subjects of true epic and the ignoble subjects of the
present comedy. This mockery is consistent with Fielding’s whole presentation of Slipslop,
which is entirely trivializing. His physical description of her sets the tone: she is a forty-five-
year-old virgin, short and corpulent, florid and pimply, with small eyes, a large nose, bovine
breasts, and legs of uneven length. Many readers have detected something cruel in the zest with
which Fielding enumerates the physical disadvantages of this middle-aged spinster, but such
sympathy is perhaps misplaced: in Fielding’s scheme of character, Mrs. Slipslop is simply not a
feeling subject. She is a character type rather than a naturalistic personality; she does not exist
in everyday life, rather she represents a category of women who do. With characters such as
Slipslop -- and the majority of Fielding’s characters exist on this plane of typicality -- Fielding
imposes a distance between the reader on the one hand and the characters and their actions on
the other. Many modern readers, accustomed to considering psychological realism one of the
great virtues of the novel, will regret Fielding’s objectification of his characters, but as
Macallister observes, “if we lose by this, we also gain. We see the characters in their context;
not only their social context but their moral context.” By fixing characters by their eternal
qualities in this way, Fielding’s distant, omniscient, and judgmental narrator offers “a picture of
society that is wider, more comprehensive,” than that of the novelist who treats characters as
realistic, developing, and morally ambiguous subjects.
Two characters Joseph encounters on his journey appear to be types of the pursuit of violence
for its own sake. They are of course the Two Ruffians who beat and strip Joseph and steal his
money. In rendering this episode, Fielding again does not encourage the reader to identify with
any of its participants, not even with the victimized hero Joseph. The matter-of-fact way in
which he describes the violations does not focus our attention on Joseph’s experience of pain;
rather, its effect is much different: “[B]oth [Ruffians] together fell to be-labouring poor Joseph
with their Sticks, till they were convinced they had put an end to his miserable Being: They then
stript him entirely naked, threw him into a Ditch, and departed with their Booty.” By leaving
subjective experience entirely out of his account, Fielding heightens the absurdity of the
incident until the violence feels gratuitous: these violent acts are not motivated, they have no
emotional context or significance, they simply are. As Simon Varey comments, the scene
depicts “mindless, antisocial hostility”: the thieves’ “primary and ostensible purpose is to take
money and property,” but in their assault on Joseph they “display a level of violence that their
situation does not require or justify.” As Varey goes on to argue, Fielding sees violence as
pervading every level of society and existence, manifesting itself with varying degrees of
explicitness: an erratic Lady, a lecherous old maid, a pair of armed robbers. The Two Ruffians
represent only one of the most egregious outbreaks of a prevalent dynamic: “[a] violent Storm
of Hail forced Joseph to take Shelter in [an] Inn” in Chapter XI, and this same meteorological
situation will recur throughout the novel because in Fielding’s world, even the weather is
violent.
If violence exists on many levels and in many degrees, crime does as well: when Fielding
reveals that the Postilion who has given Joseph his coat “hath since been transported for
robbing a Hen-roost,” the less-than-subtle message is that what is truly criminal in this scene is
the indifference displayed by the other, more genteel stage-coach passengers toward their
fellow-man. The stage-coach scene is one of the most famous in the novel because it presents
the complex interactions of hypocrites: a Lady begins to take pity on Joseph but, on learning
that he is naked, finds propriety the more urgent principle, and a lawyer finally convinces the
group to tend to Joseph by appealing not to their humanity but to their self-interest. When
Joseph refuses to approach in a condition that would offend the ladies, none of the well-to-do
passengers will risk soiling their garments with his blood. In striving to isolate themselves from
the wretched and the criminal, then, the passengers reveal themselves to be the real malefactors.
Following Joseph’s encounters with the Ruffians and the hypocritical stage-coach passengers,
and indeed completing the experience, is the introduction of Mrs. Tow-wouse, wife of the
keeper of the inn where the coach eventually stops. As she rebukes her husband for having
offered a shirt to the naked Joseph, demanding, “[W]hat the devil have we to do with naked
wretches?,” she becomes, in the words of Richard J. Dircks, “a spokesman for the purely
pragmatic, unsympathetic, and uncharitable view of life” that is an attribute of all of the least
appealing characters in the novel. Fielding insinuates her basic affinity with the Ruffians, and
her essential difference from Joseph, through his representation of her voice: her aggressive use
of such epithets as “Slut” and “scabby Rascals,” her recourse to such threats as “I will throw the
Chamber-pot at your Head,” and, in a later chapter, her “loud and hoarse” voice, all are aural
manifestations of her harsh nature. As Varey notes, Fielding often uses voice quality to reflect
character, and Mrs. Tow-wouse contrasts strongly with Joseph, who once failed to frighten
birds and dogs because the animals heard only the sweetness that was in him both a vocal tone
and a moral one.
Book I, Chapters XIII through XVIII.
Summary.
Chapter XIII.
Mr. Tow-wouse and the Surgeon visit Joseph Andrews, who tells them the story of his
encounter with the Two Ruffians. Joseph then asks the Surgeon about the prospects for his
recovery, and the Surgeon advises him to settle his worldly affairs. Mr. Tow-wouse accordingly
sends for Mr. Barnabas, the clergyman, who approaches Joseph’s room only after having taken
Tea with the landlady and Punch with the landlord. Mr. Barnabas then goes back for another
drink and returns to find Joseph apostrophizing his sister, Pamela Andrews, and extolling the
value of sexual purity. The clergyman concludes that Joseph is delirious and excuses himself
from further interference.

The Surgeon returns and declares that Joseph is in fact not delirious but in command of his
senses. They send for Mr. Barnabas again, and the clergyman urges Joseph to repent of all his
sins and resign himself to leaving the world. Joseph is generally compliant but hedges when it
comes to Fanny Goodwill, saying that he will have difficulty resigning himself to the divine
will if the divine will proposes to separate him from his beloved. He agrees, however, to “divest
himself of all human Passion, and fix his Heart above,” if the clergyman will only help him to
do it. Mr. Barnabas recommends “Prayer and Faith.” He then urges Joseph to forgive the Two
Ruffians “as a Christian ought,” but he gives no further specifics as to what the Christian
manner of forgiveness entails. Mr. Barnabas soon wraps up the visit and returns to the parlor,
where the punch has been waiting for him. There he reports to Mrs. Tow-wouse that Joseph has
expressed a desire for tea; Mrs. Tow-wouse does not want to spare it, however, so Betty the
chambermaid goes out to buy some tea for Joseph herself.
Chapter XIV.
In the evening, “a grave Person” arrives at the inn and sits down by the kitchen fire. There he
hears Mrs. Tow-wouse and Betty discussing their injured guest, whom Betty now believes to be
a gentleman on the basis of his fine skin. The grave person feels compassion for the injured
guest and questions the Surgeon about him. The Surgeon uses medical jargon to rebuff the
inquiries of the grave person, who claims to have some little expertise in surgery and whom the
Surgeon seems to consider impudent.
Meanwhile, some young men from the neighborhood arrive at the inn with one of the Ruffians.
Betty informs Joseph, who asks her to look out for a token he received from Fanny, a piece of
gold with a ribbon. A search of the Ruffian reveals the gold piece, which Betty conveys to an
ecstatic Joseph. Some other young men recover a bundle of Joseph’s clothes in a ditch, and the
grave person, recognizing the livery as that of the Booby household, goes upstairs to meet the
injured guest. A happy reunion thus takes place between Joseph and Mr. Abraham Adams.
Back in the kitchen, the mob that apprehended the Ruffian finds that it has no real evidence to
prove his involvement in the robberies. Mr. Barnabas and the Surgeon argue over whether the
recovered goods belong to the lord of the manor or to some other party. The Ruffian nearly
makes allies of Barnabas, the Surgeon, and Tow-wouse, but Betty intervenes to inform
everyone of the gold piece, which would seem to prove the Ruffian’s guilt. They resolve to
keep the Ruffian overnight and take him to the Justice in the morning.
Chapter XV.
Betty tells Mrs. Tow-wouse that Joseph, who appears to be on familiar terms with Mr. Adams,
may be “a greater Man than they took him for”; as a result, Mrs. Tow-wouse begins to feel
better about having extended charity to him. Mr. Barnabas and the Surgeon approach Joseph,
wanting to use his gold piece as evidence against the Ruffian, but Joseph will not give it up and
Mr. Adams supports him.
Mr. Adams explains to Joseph that he is on his way to London to publish some volumes of
sermons. He encourages Joseph to take a light meal, which Joseph accordingly does. In the
morning Mr. Barnabas and the Surgeon come to the inn to help convey the Ruffian before the
Justice. They are both quite zealous in bringing the Ruffian to justice, and in order to account
for their zeal Fielding explains that these two gentlemen have long competed to perform the
function of lawyer in the parish, since there is no proper lawyer in it. Fielding concludes the
chapter with an apostrophe to vanity, eventually admitting that the reason for this passage is
merely “to lengthen out a short Chapter.”
Chapter XVI.
The Ruffian turns out to have escaped during the night. The Constable who was guarding him
comes under suspicion of having aided his escape, not so much because his name is Tom
Suckbribe as because, “not having been concerned in the taking of the Thief, he could not have
been entitled to any part of the Reward, if he had been convicted.”
Joseph rises but still is not well enough to travel. Mr. Adams, having bought meals for himself
and Joseph, is running low on money and attempts to borrow three guineas from Mr. Tow-
wouse, leaving as a pledge a volume of his sermons. The landlord declines this plan,
disappointing Mr. Adams, who has run out of ideas. Mr. Adams goes off to smoke his pipe, and
meanwhile a coach and six drives up, carrying a young fellow and a coachman named Jack,
who insult each other lustily as they settle themselves in the inn. Meanwhile, the footmen from
the coach go to the kitchen, where they discuss having seen “Parson Adams smoaking his Pipe
in the Gallery.” Mr. Barnabas, overhearing them, decides to sit down Mr. Adams to a bowl of
punch, now that he knows him to be a fellow man of the cloth. Mr. Adams accepts the
invitation, and the conversation comes around to the volumes of sermons that he wishes to
publish. Mr. Barnabas warns him that he knows from experience that no one read sermons
anymore.
When the punch is gone, Mr. Adams goes upstairs to check on Joseph, who is sitting down to a
loin of mutton. The Surgeon enters and attributes Joseph’s recovery to the powers of a medicine
that, as it happens, Joseph has not touched. Joseph takes another three days to recover from his
wounds, then resolves to set off again the next day, urging Mr. Adams to continue on to
London. Mr. Adams still expects great things of his sermons, so he agrees to Joseph’s plan. In
the evening they repair to Joseph’s room and spend “a considerable time in Prayer and
Thanksgiving.”
Chapter XVII.
Mr. Barnabas sends for Mr. Adams so that he can meet a London Bookseller who has recently
arrived. Mr. Adams is delighted with the opportunity to make some cash without leaving the
inn. The Bookseller does not indulge Mr. Adams for very long, explaining that most sermons do
not sell well and concluding, “I had rather be excused.” He offers, however, to take the
manuscript to London with him and send his opinion of it to Mr. Adams shortly. They go on to
discuss the publishing trade and which genres sell the best, and the Bookseller remarks that, far
from objecting to the publication of sermons per se, he is happy to publish the abnormally
lucrative sermons of the Methodist George Whitefield. Mr. Adams and Mr. Barnabas then argue
over the merits and demerits of Whitefield: Barnabas finds Whitefield’s advocacy of clerical
poverty offensive, whereas Adams shares Whitefield’s objection to “the Luxury and Splendour
of the Clergy” but cannot accept “the detestable Doctrine of Faith against Good Works.” Adams
imagines a soul in Whitefield’s scheme appearing before God on the last day and pleading,
“Lord, it is true I never obeyed one of thy Commandments, yet punish me not, for I believe
them all”; he even suggests that “a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in
the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho’ his Faith was as perfectly
orthodox as St. Paul’s himself.” The Bookseller, suspecting that Mr. Adams’s doctrines would
not sit well with the bishops and thereby would suffer on the market, once again begs to be
excused from the project. Mr. Adams goes on to express further low-church opinions on the
nature and purpose of Sunday service, whereupon Mr. Barnabas rings for the bill, eager to flee
the company of such a heterodox clergyman.
A great commotion erupts somewhere else in the inn: “Mrs. Tow-wouse, Mr. Tow-wouse, and
Betty, all lifting up their Voices together.” The landlady is heard to accuse her husband of
“abus[ing] my Bed, my own Bed, with my own Servant”; she also threatens violence against
Betty and calls her a derogatory name that Fielding makes a great show of rendering, delicately,
as “She Dog.” Betty objects to the slur, and Mrs. Tow-wouse brandishes the spit; Mr. Adams,
however, intervenes and prevents the assault.
Chapter XVIII.
Fielding enumerates Betty’s personality attributes, which include “Good-nature, Generosity and
Compassion,” but also lasciviousness. He then summarizes her sexual history, which is less
promiscuous than it might have been. She has been attracted to Joseph since his arrival, but just
today she made a move, which Joseph rebuffed. Lustful and wrathful, Betty considered stabbing
Joseph, “devouring him with Kisses,” and committing suicide; without resolving these issues,
she went to her master’s room to make his bed and, finding him there, received his advances in
lieu of Joseph’s. Mrs. Tow-wouse walked in at the end of the encounter, and the uproar of the
last chapter ensued. Mrs. Tow-wouse discharges Betty and brings her husband back under her
thumb.
Analysis.
Fielding bestowed on his exemplary parson, Mr. Abraham Adams, a resoundingly biblical and
paternal name: the Adam of Genesis was the father of mankind, while Abraham was the father
of the people of Israel (and by extension, in the Christian tradition, of all the faithful). Nor does
Parson Adams fail to live up to his namesakes: as a dedicated clergyman and the spiritual
advisor of our young hero, he serves as the novel's moral touchstone, which is to say that other
characters reveal their own moral quality through their responses to him. The goodness of
Joseph Andrews shows through in his love and admiration of Adams, while the parson's endless
tribulations at the hands of others -- in the words of one critic, Adams "is laughed at, maligned,
physically bruised, confined, dismissed, humiliated, and repeatedly made a butt for abuse" -- are
an index of society’s alienation from Christian values. Mr. Adams, of course, is not without his
own flaws, which include forgetfulness, naïveté, and mild vanity; all of these cause him to look
foolish from time to time, and Fielding does not shrink from joining in the laughter. The
novelist's leading idea, however, seems to be that anyone who exemplifies Adams's virtues of
poverty and charity will inevitably appear foolish by worldly standards.
Mr. Adams is, to begin with, physically eccentric: tall, thin, and strong, he is proud of his
athleticism but careless of his appearance, and Fielding never tires of recording his sartorial
lapses. Thus, in Chapter XVI, we learn: "He had on a Night-Cap drawn over his Wig, and a
short great Coat, which half covered his Cassock; a Dress which, added to something comical
enough in his Countenance, composed a Figure likely to attract the Eyes of those who were not
over-given to Observation." (This is in fact one of the less ridiculous chapters in Fielding’s
chronicle of Mr. Adams’s toilette.) Mr. Adams’s sartorial incompetence is only one aspect of
his inability to adapt himself to his surroundings: he is totally unworldly, constantly losing track
of his money or engaging to spend money he does not have; he is perfectly humorless, with no
sense of how others, such as the mocking Surgeon, perceive him; he is endlessly gullible; and
he is optimistic to a fault, as in his serene faith that his sermons will find a publisher and take
London by storm. All of these foibles have a common denominator, namely Mr. Adams’s
childlike innocence; seen in its proper context, then, Adams’s physical shabbiness should only
enhance our sense of his moral dignity.
All of Fielding's novels are crawling with clergyman characters, and Joseph Andrews presents
several who serve as contrasts to the paragon Mr. Adams. In these chapters, Mr. Barnabas
shows himself to be perfectly sociable and impeccably orthodox but not much interested in
bettering the lot of his fellow-man: refreshing himself first with tea and then with punch before
approaching the bedside of the injured Joseph, he is clearly one of those clergymen who looks
on his vocation more as a platform for socializing than as a sacrificial commitment. Barnabas's
moral inadequacy is further limned in the discussion of George Whitefield that emerges from
Adams's fruitless negotiations with the Bookseller. Mr. Barnabas's objection to Methodism has
to do with its emphasis on clerical poverty: Barnabas sees no reason why a clergyman in the
Church of England should not be able to amass as much luxury as anyone else, whereas both
Adams and Fielding consider poverty an ideal for the clergy, at least insofar as temporal
concerns should not interfere with a clergyman's charitable ministrations. Mr. Adams's
objection to Methodism, which is also Fielding's objection, has to do with its emphasis on faith
over charity or good works: he gives his opinion "that a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are
more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho' his Faith
was as perfectly orthodox as St. Paul's himself." For Adams, a man's formal religious
commitments matter far less than his active benevolence. Hearing this moral scheme, Mr.
Barnabas exits the scene and the novel in a manner that confirms his moral worthlessness:
ringing the bell "with all the Violence imaginable" in order to make his escape from Mr.
Adams, he exiles himself from the circle of approved characters.
Fielding does not expect the clergy alone to practice charity; rather, it is a standard that he sets
for the citizenry at large. Betty the chamber-maid is an interesting case in point because
Fielding's presentation of her conduct reveals that, despite all the uproar in the novel over the
virtue of chastity, he in fact prizes charity much more highly. When Joseph arrives at the inn,
Betty distinguishes herself through her willingness to assist him in his need: when Mrs. Tow-
wouse refuses to supply Joseph with either a shirt or a cup of tea, Betty takes it upon herself to
procure these items for him. Her other distinguishing characteristic, however, is her sexual
promiscuity: she has been "not entirely constant to [her sweetheart] John, with whom she
permitted Tom Whipwell the Stage-Coachman, and now and then a handsome young Traveller,
to share her Favours"; she also has "a Flame in her," namely venereal disease, "which required
the Care of a Surgeon to cool." This sexual voracity aligns her with Lady Booby and Mrs.
Slipslop, especially insofar as it prompts her to make an attempt on Joseph's purity, and yet
Fielding does not subject Betty to anything like the level of criticism that we have seen in the
previous two cases. As Simon Varey notes, the scene in which Betty throws herself at Joseph
perhaps makes Joseph look a bit ridiculous, as he leaps away "in great Confusion" and tells her
priggishly that "he was sorry to see a young Woman cast off all Regard to Modesty"; by
contrast, Betty's subsequent impulses toward recrimination, while they do not reflect well on
her, nevertheless do not encourage readers to laugh at her in the manner of Lady Booby's mood
swings or Mrs. Slipslop's satirical embodiment as the "hungry Tygress." In keeping with the
Preface's definition of "the true Ridiculous," Betty never seems ridiculous because she has no
affectation; unlike Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop, she never sets herself above other people or
pretends to be sexually virtuous. Moreover, "[s]he had Good-nature, Generosity and
Compassion," as her previous behavior toward Joseph has demonstrated. Perfect sexual
continence outside marriage, then, appears in Fielding’s moral scheme to be similar to doctrinal
orthodoxy, laudable in a person who is otherwise benevolent but hardly the most important
moral quality.
Fielding even seems to suggest that there may be a connection, psychologically speaking,
between the disposition to perform acts of charity and the disposition to enjoy sex: anyone who
remembers that Mr. Tow-wouse dispatched Betty to give one of his own shirts to Joseph before
Mrs. Tow-wouse intervened should not be surprised, after the chambermaid's rejection by
Joseph, to find Betty and Mr. Tow-wouse once more in league together against his wife. Mrs.
Tow-wouse, too, occupies a familiar role, that of standing on the sidelines and carping at her
husband and the maid. Fielding's physical description of Mrs. Tow-wouse is revealing: it reads
in part, "Her Lips were two Bits of Skin, which, whenever she spoke, she drew together in a
Purse. Her Chin was peeked, and at the upper end of that Skin, which composed her Cheeks,
stood two Bones, that almost hid a Pair of small red Eyes." It is a withered, pinched, sour
countenance, and one may conjecture that Mrs. Tow-wouse is scarcely more pleasant as a
bedmate than as a giver of alms and succor. Fielding admires honesty, straightforwardness, and
fellow-feeling, no less in sexual relations than in normal social interactions. Unlike his literary
foil Richardson, he is never coy about sex, as will soon be evident in respect of Joseph and
Fanny, who despite (or because of) their goodness are hardly less frank about their mutual
attraction than are Betty and her many lovers.
Book II, Chapters I through V.
Summary.
Chapter I.
At the start of Book II, Fielding addresses the authorly practice of dividing literary works into
books and chapters. He compares the chapters of a book to the stages of a physical journey,
with the white spaces between them standing for inns and resting-places. At the ends of
chapters, Fielding suggests, the reader should pause to consider what he has read, just as a
traveler considers the “curious Productions of Nature.” The “Contents prefixed to every
Chapter” parallel the inscriptions over the gates of inns indicating what entertainment the
traveler can expect. Fielding goes on to claim Homer as a precedent in dividing a literary work
into books, with Virgil and Milton following him.

Chapter II.
Mr. Abraham Adams and Joseph Andrews are about to part ways, but the curate decides against
London when it appears that he has in fact left his manuscript sermons at home. Mr. Adams,
looking on the bright side, interprets the disappointment as a providence intended for his good.
When the inn bill comes, Mr. Adams has only a shilling to spare, and he would have been even
worse off if a servant belonging to the coach and six had not lent him a guinea. He and Joseph
set off together for the country seat of the Booby family, planning to take turns riding the horse.
While Mr. Adams starts on foot, however, the Hostler detains Joseph at the inn, demanding
payment for the horse’s board. Joseph refuses to pay with Fanny Goodwill’s gold piece, so the
dispute bogs down. Meanwhile, Mr. Adams has forgotten all about Joseph during a meditation
on Æschylus. After a time he remembers his companion and gradually begins to wonder what is
keeping him. He sits down to read some Æschylus, and when Joseph still does not appear, he
enters a nearby alehouse.
Chapter III.
In the alehouse, Mr. Adams overhears two travelers discussing Joseph’s quandary; he resolves
to return to the inn, though he has no real plan for making the payment. A rainstorm prevents
him, however, and he stays for a beer with the two travelers, who give him their separate
opinions about a neighboring gentleman landowner: one considers the gentleman a cruel tyrant
and an arbitrary Justice of the Peace, and the other considers him reasonable and just. Confused,
Adams applies to the Host, who explains to him that the two travelers were opposing parties in
the only cause the Justice has decided recently; the Host then gives his opinion that “neither of
them spoke a Syllable of Truth.” Mr. Adams expresses to the cynical Host his religious horror
of lying.
A stage coach arrives carrying Mrs. Slipslop, who has paid for Adams’s horse during a stopover
at the inn. Joseph then arrives on the horse, and he and Mr. Adams settle between them that the
curate should continue the journey in the stage coach while Joseph continues on horseback. In
the carriage, Mr. Adams and Mrs. Slipslop discuss the recent developments in the Booby
family. Slipslop reports that Lady Booby has acted ”like a Madwoman” since the departure of
Joseph, and when Mr. Adams expresses his regret over her decline, Slipslop suggests that he
knows less about the family than he thinks: Lady Booby, she says, was the stingy one, and Sir
Thomas would have been more generous to the poor in the parish if his wife had let him. Mr.
Adams remarks that Mrs. Slipslop once took the opposite view of the Boobys. Soon another
lady in the carriage informs her fellow passengers that “yonder lives the unfortunate Leonora,”
and their entreaties soon induce her to relate the story of Leonora.
Chapter IV.
Leonora was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman and the possessor of many superficial
charms. At eighteen, while she was living with an aunt in the north of England, she began a
flirtation with a sardonic young lawyer named Horatio. Horatio soon conceived “the most
violent Passion for Leonora” and proposed marriage to her, which proposal Leonora initially
resisted but ultimately accepted. The lovers then exchanged some letters and set the date for the
wedding. When the happy day was two weeks off, Horatio had to attend the sessions for their
county, leaving Leonora alone to gawk at a passing coach and six and exclaim, “O, I am in love
with that Equipage!” The owner of the coach and six, a Frenchified cavalier named Bellarmine,
admired Leonora conspicuously at that evening’s assembly. Leonora found herself the happy
target of every woman’s hatred: “She had before known what it was to torment a single
Woman; but to be hated and secretly cursed by a whole Assembly, was a Joy reserved for this
blessed Moment.” Leonora danced the night away with Bellarmine, despite her earlier
resolution not to dance while Horatio was away.
The next day Bellarmine proposed to Leonora, who referred him to her father and then worried,
though briefly, that she had wronged Horatio. Her primary motive in changing fiancées was
financial: “How vast is the difference between being the Wife of a poor Counsellor, and the
Wife of one of Bellarmine’s Fortune!” She further rationalized the action by reasoning that if
Horatio mourned the loss of his beloved, “Bellarmine may be as miserable for me too.” The
next morning her Aunt advised her to accept Bellarmine, arguing that “there is not any thing
worth our Regard besides Money.” Leonora accepted this reasoning, and she and Bellarmine
settled it between them that he would seek her father’s consent soon. After supper the lovers sat
chatting about French and English clothing when Horatio appeared unexpectedly, triggering “a
long Silence.” Horatio finally broke the ice, whereupon Leonora played dumb about their
engagement. Staggered, Horatio exclaimed, “I am in a Dream; for it is impossible I should be
really esteemed a common Acquaintance by Leonora, after what has passed between us!” Some
sparring ensued between Horatio and Bellarmine concerning the role each occupied with
respect to Leonora, but the lady’s Aunt soon entered and updated Horatio about “a small
Alteration in the Affections of Leonora.” The lawyer would have dueled the cavalier then and
there, had not the ladies prevented it. Horatio soon took his leave.
Leonora awoke the next morning to the news that “Bellarmine was run through the Body by
Horatio, . . . and the Surgeons had declared the Wound mortal.” The Aunt advised Leonora to
go back to Horatio, but Leonora claimed that she must have time to grieve before strategizing;
she then argued that Horatio would never forgive her and that it was all the fault of the Aunt. A
cheerful note from Bellarmine, however, reconciled the ladies to each other and dispelled all
thoughts of returning to Horatio. Leonora’s passion for Horatio revived “with greater Force
after its small Relaxation than ever,” and she planned, against the advice of her Aunt, to visit
Bellarmine during his recovery.
Before the lady in the coach can finish her story, however, the coach arrives at an inn for
dinner, “sorely to the dissatisfaction of Mr. Adams,” who has been listening avidly.
Chapter V.
At the inn, Mr. Adams encounters Joseph, who is in the kitchen recovering from a riding
accident with the aid of the Hostess. The surly Host enters and, finding his wife tending to a
mere footman, curses at her and directs her to attend the more genteel guests. Mr. Adams has
sharp words with the Host, and Joseph intervenes to advise the Host to have more respect for
the socially superior Mr. Adams. A brawl ensues, and when the Host goes down for the count,
the Hostess dashes a pan of hog’s blood in Mr. Adams’s face. Mrs. Slipslop arrives and assaults
the Hostess, whose cries bring three more guests to the kitchen. The Host, recovering,
reproaches his wife for having wasted the hog’s blood and says that she deserved the beating
she received at the hands of Mrs. Slipslop. One of the other guests, who happens to be one of
the litigious gentlemen who gave an opinion of the Justice of the Peace in Chapter III, urges the
Host to bring legal action against Mr. Adams; the Host, however, has seen neighbors ruin
themselves through frivolous lawsuits. The other litigious gentleman, meanwhile, urges Mr.
Adams to bring legal action against the Host; Mr. Adams, however, admits to having struck the
first blow, and he recoils from the suggestion that Joseph, being the only bystander, could
support him in lying on this point. Mr. Adams asserts with some dignity the integrity of his
character and his office, and the two litigious gentlemen cease meddling to congratulate
themselves on having effected a reconciliation between the two parties.
As the coach is preparing to leave again, Mrs. Grave-airs snobbishly resists admitting Joseph, a
mere footman but too injured to go on horseback, into the coach. Mrs. Slipslop advocates for
Joseph, and the argument continues until Mrs. Grave-airs notices her father, who has just
arrived and who invites her to ride on with him. The Coachman then reveals to Mr. Adams that
Mrs. Grave-airs’s father is now the steward in a prominent household and has servants himself,
but that he is low-born and once worked as a postilion. Mr. Adams passes this information
along to Mrs. Slipslop, expecting that it will please her, but she regrets having antagonized a
family of upper servants in the neighborhood and fears that the story might get back to Lady
Booby. Once the coach has departed, all the female passengers begin to disparage Mrs. Grave-
airs for trying to act above her station. Mrs. Slipslop speaks feelingly on behalf of Joseph,
wondering aloud how any “Christian Woman” could object to the sight of Joseph. The other
ladies grow anxious about the turn Slipslop’s conversation seems to be taking, so one of them
suggests that they hear the end of the story of Leonora.
Analysis.
The action of Book II starts with Mr. Adams finding himself in what will become a highly
characteristic predicament: he lacks the funds to pay the bill he has racked up at the inn. Mr.
Adams, like Fielding himself at the time of composing the novel, is constantly in debt;
fortunately, however, the same unworldliness that leads to these bouts of insolvency prevents
him from despairing. Instead, he asks trustingly for help, for as he himself would never refuse a
request for financial assistance, he always expects that others will lend him the money he needs.
In this particular instance, the people around him reward his faith: a servant from the coach and
six springs Adams and Joseph from the inn, and later Mrs. Slipslop (albeit with a less than
virtuous motive) releases the parson's horse and Joseph along with it.
No less characteristic of Adams is his having forgotten his manuscripts at home; as the episode
of his wading needlessly through a stream suggests, Mr. Adams is prone to these errors because
he is both literally and figuratively short-sighted. The detail of his sitting down to read the
works of the classical tragedian Æschylus gives a clue as to the literary influences behind
Fielding's characterizing him in this way. Mr. Adams resembles Cervantes's Don Quixote in
having a vision that is naïve in a peculiarly bookish way: as Homer Goldberg observes, Adams's
continual horror at the wickedness of others arises not only from his own natural goodness,
which he tends to project onto others, but also from his assumption that "the noble sentiments of
the ancient poets and philosophers . . . delineate human nature as it is, rather than as it might or
ought to be." Thus, the story moves from examples of Adams's absent-mindedness (with respect
to money, manuscripts, and moving water) straight to an incident in which a couple of
worldlings display a less exalted side of human nature: while stopping at the next inn, Adams is
shocked to learn that two litigious gentlemen would allow self-interest to guide their moral
judgments of others. Mr. Adams errs in confusing erudition with practical wisdom and insight
into the minds and actions of everyday human beings; this lack of emphasis on the practical side
of things manifests itself in his forgetfulness, his accumulation of debt, and his idealistic
expectation of good faith in others.
The first chapter of Book II, like that of Book I, contains Fielding's commentary on his
procedure as a novelist; here, he addresses his division of the novel into books and chapters that
allow the reader to pause for reflection. Fielding claims once again to be taking his cues from
classical writers such as Homer, and indeed the use of numbered books is an organizational
technique typical of the epic. Another structural inheritance from the epic, one that Fielding
does not discuss, is the interpolation of digressive tales such as that of Leonora, which begins in
Chapter IV. Readers who are inclined to criticize the weakness of Fielding's plot structure, with
its many improbable occurrences and flat characters popping in and out, often disapprove of
these digressions as distractions from the main story. Nevertheless, the tales do serve the main
narrative, as the telling of Leonora's demonstrates: not only does the characterization of Mr.
Adams gather an amusing new wrinkle (as the upright clergyman turns out to be an avid
consumer of gossipy stories), but Leonora's biography underscores important themes as well.
Some critics have called the digressive tales "negative analogues," meaning that they express
negatively the positive moral themes of the main story. Thus, while Joseph and Fanny embody
everything that young lovers ought to be and do, Leonora manages to get everything wrong.
The fact that she begins with every earthly advantage makes her folly all the less forgivable: she
is wealthy, attractive, popular, and shrewd; her only weakness is a moral one, as she brings to
her selection of husbands a form of pragmatism that is really just applied selfishness. This
pragmatism misfires when Leonora abandons the man she really loves for a wealthier man who,
as will be seen in the conclusion of her story, is no less self-interested than she is. For being too
clever by half, the novel punishes Leonora, rewarding instead the dogged loyalty of Joseph and
Fanny; the contrast between her sophistication and their straightforwardness implies that
Fielding's providence favors simplicity, which Fielding considers an attribute of goodness.
Fielding's classical influences manifest themselves also in the farcical battle scene of Chapter
V: serious epics are full of lavishly detailed scenes of combat that substantiate the heroic
qualities of the participants, but in Fielding the narrative specificity serves, of course, not to
glorify the action but to underscore its ludicrousness. Naturally, Mr. Adams epitomizes this
ludicrousness: the Hostess dashes the hog's blood into his face "with so good an Aim, that much
the greater part first saluting his Countenance, trickled thence in so large a current down his
Beard, and over his Garments, that a more horrible Spectacle was hardly to be seen or even
imagined"; when the smoke has cleared, "[t]he principal Figure, and which engaged the Eyes of
all, was Adams," who, as usual, looks the silliest. He does not, however, descend to the level of
the guiltiest: the hog's blood battle provides a useful window into Fielding's ethics, and the fact
that neither Adams nor Joseph thinks of turning the other cheek indicates that Fielding does not
use violence and nonviolence as a basis on which to distinguish the wicked characters from the
virtuous. Whether a particular violent act is ethical or not turns out to be a question of motive:
the Host has threatened the two travelers because he is irritated with Adams and Joseph for
requesting charity from his wife and because he resents Joseph's suggestion that Adams is his
social superior; by contrast, the violence of Adams and Joseph is simply reactive, part self-
defense and part retaliation against the Host's gratuitous aggression. In Fielding's world, where
where violence is normative, even the best Christians cannot be pacifists.
Book II, Chapters VI through XII.
Summary.
Chapter VI.
Leonora acted as Bellarmine’s nurse, and her almost constant presence in his apartment became
a subject for gossip among the ladies of the town. After his recovery, Bellarmine finally set out
to seek the approval of Leonora’s father. The miserly old gentleman had no objection to his
daughter’s making such an advantageous match, but he also had no intention of providing her
with a dowry. When Bellarmine clarified that he would not take Leonora without a dowry, the
old gentleman expressed his regret that Leonora should lose such an eligible match. Failing to
persuade his would-be father-in-law, Bellarmine left the house and the country, returning to
France without seeing Leonora, and sent from Paris a note explaining to her why they could not
marry after all. After receiving the bad news, Leonora returned to the house that occasioned the
telling of her story, where she has “led a disconsolate Life.” Horatio, meanwhile, has worked
hard and acquired “a very considerable Fortune,” and he has never spoken an ill word of
Leonora.
Chapter VII.
Mr. Abraham Adams has forgotten all about his horse and has been walking ahead of the coach
all this time. When the passengers notice him and try to overtake him, he treats it as a game and
outruns the coach. Once he has gotten three miles ahead, he sits down with his Æschylus to wait
for the coach to catch up. A Sportsman hunting partridge soon comes upon him, and they start a
conversation about the scarcity of game in the area, which the Sportsman blames on the soldiers
who are quartered in the neighborhood. When Adams remarks that shooting is a soldier’s line of
work, the Sportsman wishes that the soldiers were “so forward to shoot our Enemies.” He
expresses his admiration for men who are willing to die for their country, which sentiment
favorably impresses Mr. Adams, who is eager to continue the discussion in this vein.
Chapter VIII.
Mr. Adams says that though he has never made “so noble a Sacrifice” as soldiers make,
nevertheless he too has suffered, in his own small way, “for the sake of [his] Conscience.” He
once had a nephew who kept a shop and was an Alderman of a Corporation, and he more than
once missed out on opportunities of employment within the church when he refused to sell his
influence over his nephew’s vote. Eventually he encouraged the nephew to vote for Sir Thomas
Booby, having been impressed with Sir Thomas’s command of “Affairs.” Sir Thomas won the
election and became a classically verbose Member of Parliament, but Adams never received the
living Sir Thomas had promised him, as Lady Booby preferred to bestow it elsewhere. Nor has
Mr. Adams ever had much access to the Booby family, presumably because Lady Booby “did
not think [his] Dress good enough for the Gentry at her Table.” Adams remembers Sir Thomas
fondly, however, as Sir Thomas always allowed him to take a glass of ale from his cellar on
Sundays. Mr. Adams no longer has much political clout since the death of his Alderman
nephew, though he does take advantage of his pulpit to advocate certain causes during election
season, hoping thereby to gain the support of the local gentry in getting an ordination for his
son, who is at a disadvantage because he has not been to university. Like his father before him,
the Mr. Adams the Younger strives to serve God and country.
Chapter IX.
The Sportsman expresses his opinion that any man not willing to die for his country is not
willing to live in it, and he says that he disinherited a nephew who joined the army but refused
to be stationed in the West Indies. Mr. Adams counsels greater patience, arguing that “if Fear
had too much Ascendance in the Mind, the Man was rather to be pitied than abhorred.” The
Sportsman repeats his conviction of the transcendent importance of courage and country and
then, upon hearing Adams mention the stage-coach, tells him that the last coach is three miles
ahead of them and invites the curate to stay the night at his house. Mr. Adams accepts, and they
begin the walk to the Sportsman’s house, with the Sportsman “renewing his Discourse on
Courage, and the Infamy of not being ready at all times to sacrifice our Lives to our Country.”
While they are walking, they hear a woman’s screams. Mr. Adams, armed with a stick, hastens
to the spot, while “the Man of Courage made as much Expedition towards his own House,
whither he escaped in a very short time without once looking behind him: where we will leave
him, to contemplate his own Bravery, and to censure the Want of it in others.” Mr. Adams finds
the screaming woman fending off a sexual assault; he bludgeons the attacker with the stick and
then endures a “drubbing” from him, playing rope-a-dope until the attacker tires himself and
Mr. Adams can deliver a series of punches, including a well-placed blow to the chin, which
succeeds so well that Mr. Adams fears he may have killed his opponent. He and the woman
discuss the circumstances of the attack, and he learns that she is on her way to London. Mr.
Adams, who believes that he has killed the attacker, then begins to consider whether the
woman’s testimony will be sufficient to acquit him of murder, and “whether it would be
properer to make his Escape, or to deliver himself into the hands of Justice.”
Chapter X.
The woman Adams has rescued does not entirely trust him, worrying that he may be no better a
companion than was her attacker. While Adams stands considering whether to run or turn
himself in, a group of young men comes by, looking for birds to catch; Adams asks them to
hold their lantern over the felled attacker to determine whether he is alive or not. He is alive, in
fact, and he extemporizes a story for the young men, claiming to be “a poor Traveller, who
would otherwise have been robbed and murdered by this vile Man and Woman.” The young
men lay hold of Mr. Adams and the woman to carry them before the Justice. As they all walk
along, Mr. Adams tries to comfort and encourage the woman he has rescued while the young
men argue about how they will split their reward. When Mr. Adams mentions Joseph Andrews,
the woman realizes who her rescuer is and introduces herself as Joseph’s beloved, Fanny
Goodwill. In the ensuing discussion, Fanny feigns a lack of interest in Joseph but then asks “a
thousand Questions, which would have assured any one but Adams, who never saw farther into
People than they desired to let him, of the Truth of a Passion she endeavoured to conceal.”
Word had reached her about the attack on Joseph by the Two Ruffians, and she immediately set
out to find the man “whom, notwithstanding her Shyness to the Parson, she loved with
inexpressible Violence, though with the purest and most delicate Passion.”
Chapter XI.
They reach the Justice’s house, where the Justice does not wish to interrupt his dinner and so
orders that the prisoners should be detained in the stable, where they soon attract a crowd.
Eventually the Justice, “being now in the height of his Mirth and his Cups,” sends for the
prisoners, thinking to “have good Sport in their Examination.” He makes several lewd jokes
about Fanny while his clerk takes down the depositions. The assembled company also ridicule
Mr. Adams’s clerical dress, assuming that he has stolen it. They play along with his clergyman
persona by addressing him in Latin, prompting him to criticize their pronunciation; when he
disputes a quotation and agrees to bet a guinea on it, he finds he lacks the requisite funds and
the retraction of his bet allows the company to award the distinction in Latin expertise to his
opponent.
The Justice declines to read the clerk’s depositions and skips right to the mittimus (a warrant to
commit the accused to prison). When Mr. Adams objects to being sent to prison without having
been able to speak in his own defense, the Justice explains that there will be time for that at his
trial at the Assizes in several months. The clerk also presents to the Justice Mr. Adams’s
volume of Æschylus, which is “written, as he apprehended it, in Ciphers.” The company
eventually recognize the characters as Greek, and the Parson of the Parish, who is in attendance,
pronounces the volume “a Greek Manuscript, a very fine piece of Antiquity,” which Adams has
undoubtedly stolen.
Luckily, a Squire in the crowd has recognized Mr. Adams and vouches for his being a real
clergyman “and a Gentleman of a very good Character.” The Justice immediately agrees not to
commit Mr. Adams, though he still plans to commit Fanny Goodwill. He agrees, however, to
hear Adams’s version of events, which he then believes entirely on the strength of Adams’s
social status. Fanny’s attacker makes his escape during this tale, angering the Justice, but
eventually things settle down and the Justice and Mr. Adams have a drink together while Fanny
goes off in the care of a maid-servant. Soon a quarrel erupts outside among the young men, who
are drunk now and still contesting who would have received the greatest share of the reward if
Adams had been convicted. Mr. Adams regrets “to see so litigious a Temper in Men” and tells a
story about three candidates for a clerkship in one of his parishes, the moral of which is “the
Folly of growing warm in Disputes, in which neither Party is interested.” The Justice then
begins to “sing forth his own Praises,” but a dispute arises between the Justice and the
clergyman regarding the former’s handling of the recent case, with Mr. Adams actually arguing
that the Justice ought, “in strictness of Law, to have committed him, the said Adams,” to prison.
They might have quarreled, had not Fanny interrupted with the news that a young man is about
to depart for the very inn where Joseph has stopped. Mr. Adams, seeing that Fanny is eager to
go, agrees to accompany her.
Chapter XII.
Mr. Adams, Fanny, and their young Guide set out for the inn in the middle of the night. A
violent storm forces them to shelter in an alehouse, where Fanny impresses everyone with her
appearance. Fielding gives a complimentary description of her as a type of unpretentious rural
beauty, possessing “a natural Gentility, superior to the Acquisition of Art, which surprised all
who beheld her.” While Fanny and Adams are sitting by the fire, she hears a voice singing and
recognizes it as Joseph’s. Her shocked reaction alarms Mr. Adams, who throws his Æschylus
into the fire and calls for assistance. Joseph arrives to revive Fanny from her swoon, and the
lovers have an ecstatic reunion. Mr. Adams is delighted, until the sight of his smoldering
Æschylus ruins his mood. He rescues Æschylus while Fanny recovers herself and becomes
suddenly self-conscious. She curtsies to Mrs. Slipslop, who scornfully refuses to return the
gesture and withdraws from the room.
Analysis.
The conclusion of "The Unfortunate Jilt" winds up Leonora's biography in a manner consistent
with Fielding's vigorous ethics. Leonora and Bellarmine are, in a sense, made for each other.
The lady has a "greedy Appetite of Vanity," and the cavalier has not only a coach and six to
gratify that appetite but also a wardrobe that is "as remarkably fine as his Equipage could be":
"he had on a Cut-Velvet Coat of a Cinnamon Colour, lined with a Pink Satten," and so on, "all
in the French Fashion." Their union cannot last, however, despite (or because of) the
complementarity of their affectations: Leonora and Bellarmine lack the one thing needful, not
love in their case but money. In this they represent the negative converse of Joseph and Fanny,
but other correspondences with the main story exist as well. For instance, Leonora provides a
variation on the conduct of Lady Booby, particularly in how her swerving between suitors
echoes Lady Booby's mood swings. Leonora's volatility, however, is both less dramatic than
Lady Booby’s and more reprehensible because its outcome is preordained: her decision-making
process is not genuine psychological turmoil but is itself an affectation designed to foist
responsibility onto her Aunt, whom she can and does blame when eventually the scheme blows
up. By contrast, Horatio shares characteristics with the virtuous characters of the main plot: like
Mr. Adams and Joseph, Horatio is a straight shooter who is not averse to fighting any man who
has wronged him, and accordingly Fielding's comic providence looks out for him and brings
about his ultimate triumph. Not only does Horatio get the better of his duel with Bellarmine, but
he goes on to prosper in his law practice (differing in this, one might add, from Fielding
himself) and is, one imagines, probably better off without Leonora, notwithstanding his
nostalgia for her name and memory.
The long-awaited introduction of Fanny Goodwill occurs in these chapters, and Fielding’s
detailed physical description of her in Chapter XII contrasts her strongly with Lady Booby by
emphasizing her rural origins and unaffected simplicity. Her arms are “a little redden’d by her
Labour,” and her figure is robust and “plump” rather than fashionably delicate: she is “not one
of those slender young Women, who seem rather intended to hang up in the Hall of an
Anatomist, than for any other Purpose.” Fielding is careful also to note physical imperfections,
such as the slight unevenness of her teeth and a pox-mark on her chin, details that paradoxically
heighten her beauty by rendering it natural and credible.
The “natural Gentility, superior to the Acquisition of Art,” which Fielding notes at the end of
the description, is justified thematically; in his opposition to affectation, Fielding inevitably
propounds a sense in which straightforwardness substitutes for the social graces of the
sophisticated upper classes. In suggesting, however, that this “natural Gentility” is Fanny’s
most striking attribute, such that it “surprised all who beheld her,” Fielding betrays the basic
gist of the whole description and indeed of his presentation of Fanny throughout the novel.
Again and again he will draw the attention of his both his characters and his readers not to any
abstract quality of “Gentility” in Fanny’s bearing but rather, as here, to her luscious physical
presence. The fact that he does so, moreover, seems important to his presentation of the relation
between sex and virtue. As Richard J. Dircks observes, Joseph and Fanny complement each
other because both are vibrant natural creatures who embody the reality of sex “without the
suggestion of the lustful extravagance of Slipslop and Lady Booby, who appear in marked
contrast to” Fanny. The mutual attraction of Joseph and Fanny is full of “attractive innocence”
rather than “pretense and hypocrisy”; the novelist’s frank acknowledgment of Fanny’s sexual
appeal, which does not require the certification of gentility in order to be legitimately attractive,
is crucial to the presentation of a love that is both virtuous and robustly physical.
The scene of Adams and Fanny’s trial before the negligent Justice is an excellent and sinister
example of those minor vices, “the accidental Consequences of some human Frailty, or Foible,”
which the Preface indicated would be the main object of Fielding’s satire. As Hamilton
Macallister observes, Fielding’s “satire is usually directed against some form of the arrogant
abuse of power: the petty power of innkeepers, or the greater power of squires and justices.”
Here, the Justice who very nearly sends Adams and Fanny to prison for the very crime of which
they themselves were nearly victims (namely assault and robbery) is not actively and
deliberately malevolent; he merely wants to finish his dinner and afterward is in no mood to
give the case careful attention. His lack of seriousness is deplorable, but it is not malicious.
Further diffusing the Justice’s culpability are the young men who apprehended Adams and
Fanny and presented the Justice with a skewed case. No more than the Justice are these young
men actively wicked: they simply believed the convincing performance of Fanny’s assailant and
hoped to get a reward out of it. As a crowd gathers at the Justice’s home and the bystanders
begin throwing in their two cents, the situation grows increasingly confused: “chaotic as the
situation is,” remarks Macallister, “nobody is particularly responsible, and it is just this that
gives a nightmare quality to the scene.” The episode is perhaps too mundane even to merit the
phrase “banality of evil,” as human nature reveals itself in the psychology of the crowd and the
nonchalance of the Justice.
At length, of course, providence intervenes in the form of an anonymous gentleman who
recognizes Adams from across the room. The readiness and even politeness with which the
Justice backs away from his resolution to send Adams and Fanny before the Assizes is both
uncanny and naturalistic: once his mistake is clear to him he becomes what he has always been,
namely a very average man, conscious now of his inadequacies and rather conciliatory. At this
point even the lying assailant simply melts into the night as if he had never been. Fielding’s
world, then, is on the one hand reassuringly providential, as there is no disaster that the benign
hand of the omnipotent novelist cannot avert. On the other hand, however, Fielding’s world has
a dimension that is quite dark, for when deliberate malice is not operative in the story, “the
accidental Consequences of some human Frailty, or Foible” can always pick up its slack.
Book II, Chapters XIII through XVII.
Summary.
Chapter XIII.
Fielding clarifies that Mrs. Slipslop has not forgotten her old coworker Fanny Goodwill but has
merely asserted her social prerogative in cutting her. He goes on to explain, with a facetious
display of logic, the social gradations separating High People from Low People, or People of
Fashion from People of No Fashion. Mrs. Slipslop, being near the top of the servant class, has
adopted many of the attitudes of Lady Booby, who is near the bottom of the gentry class. Those
who have any kind of status in this scheme will “think the least Familiarity with the Persons
below them a Condescension, and if they were to go one Step farther, a Degradation.” Mr.
Abraham Adams, who has no conception of these prejudices, believes that Mrs. Slipslop has
actually forgotten Fanny and seeks to jog her memory, whereupon Mrs. Slipslop utters a slur on
Fanny’s virtue. Adams defends Fanny, expressing his wish “that all her Betters were as good,”
and tells the story of his rescuing her from the rape attempt. Slipslop disparages the unclerical
behavior Adams displayed during that episode and then, hearing that the storm has passed,
sends for Joseph Andrews, with whom she intends to proceed. He will not leave without Fanny,
however, and eventually Slipslop goes on without him. She bitterly regrets the presence of
Fanny, and Fielding slyly remarks that Joseph, no less than Fanny, has been in the presence of a
would-be rapist this evening.

Adams, Fanny, and Joseph sit all night by the fire, where Fanny finally confesses her love for
Joseph, prompting him to wake the curate and ask to be married on the spot. Mr. Adams
refuses, however, on the grounds that they have not published the banns, as the forms of the
church require. Fanny, blushing at Joseph’s haste, backs up the clergyman. When the sun has
been up for several hours, they all prepare to set out but are thwarted by a seven-shilling bill
that they cannot come close to paying. After a few minutes Adams comes up with the idea to
seek the wealthy clergyman of the parish and borrow the funds from him.
Chapter XIV.
Parson Trulliber is a parson only on Sundays and a farmer on the other six days of the week,
and he is as fat as the hogs he tends. Mrs. Trulliber mistakenly introduces Mr. Adams as a
prospective buyer of hogs, and Adams’s “natural Complacence” forces him to go through the
motions of inspecting the livestock before purchasing. One unruly hog throws him in the mire,
however, whereupon Mr. Adams declares in Latin that he has no interest in pigs. Parson
Trulliber blames his wife for the confusion and disparages her as a fool. While Mr. Adams is
washing up, Trulliber insults his wife again and invites Adams into the kitchen for refreshment,
telling Mrs. Trulliber under his breath to bring “a little of the worst Ale.” The two clergymen sit
down to eat breakfast, with Mrs. Trulliber serving and Parson Trulliber criticizing her cookery.
After breakfast, Adams gets down to business, explaining his need for a loan of seven shillings
for the current bill plus seven shillings more for the road. Trulliber recoils from this request,
pretending to take offense at the suggestion that he has amassed any worldly wealth, as if a
Christian’s treasure were of this world. Mr. Adams is delighted with Trulliber’s otherworldly
virtue but persists in his request for the sake of his friends. Parson Trulliber then accuses him of
impersonating a clergyman in order to beg for money. Mr. Adams suggests, “[S]uppose I am
not a Clergyman, I am nevertheless thy Brother, and thou, as a Christian, much more as a
Clergyman, art obliged to relieve my Distress.” He warns that faith is nothing without good
works and declares, “Whoever therefore is void of Charity, I make no scruple of pronouncing
that he is no Christian.” Parson Trulliber threatens him with his fist, but Mr. Adams departs
with a smile.
Chapter XV.
Mr. Adams returns to Joseph and Fanny, where Joseph suggests as a last resort that they ask the
Hostess, a sour-faced old woman, to trust them to pay their bill later. The Hostess surprises
them by complying. Fielding attributes this kindness to the Hostess’s confusion over the
relation between Adams and Parson Trulliber: as she believes them to be not “brothers” in the
cloth but biological brothers, she does not wish to affront the fearsome Parson by insisting on
an upfront payment of the bill. When a servant of hers goes to fetch the greatcoat and hat
Adams has left at the Trullibers’, however, the illusion is shattered and the Hostess retracts her
offer of credit. Mr. Adams thus has to canvass the parish for charity, but in vain; he returns
disillusioned with the lack of Christian charity in the country.
A poor Pedlar, meanwhile, has been listening to the Hostess’s remarks on her unfortunate
guests, and he loans Mr. Adams enough money to cover what he cannot pay. The three
companions thank him profusely, tell him where he can call for repayment, and depart: “And
thus these poor People, who could not engage the Compassion of Riches and Piety, were at
length delivered out of their Distress by the Charity of a poor Pedlar.”
Chapter XVI.
After walking for about two miles, the companions reach another inn, where a courteous and
gregarious Squire sits smoking by the door. This Squire, who says that he owns the large house
nearby, invites the travelers into the inn for refreshment. During the meal, he applauds Mr.
Adams’s affection for his two parishioners, contrasting him favorably with his own parson, who
tends to view the less wealthy among his parishioners as members of another species. He then
claims to have the living “in [his] Gift” (that is, to have the prerogative of conferring it), and as
the incumbent is old and ailing, the gentleman promises to award the living to Adams. When
Adams expresses amazement at this generosity, the Squire replies, “I esteem Riches only as
they give me an opportunity of doing Good.” He then invites the travelers to stay the night in
his mansion, adding that he will be able to furnish them with a coach and six. Mr. Adams
accepts these offers ecstatically, but while they are all preparing to leave the inn, the talkative
Squire recalls that his housekeeper is abroad, so that all the rooms are locked up; he therefore
recommends that the travelers stay in the inn after all. He then leaves them at the inn, promising
to send the coach and horses in the morning.
In the morning, however, a servant arrives with the information that his master’s horses are
temporarily out of commission because the groom has administered to them a course of physic.
Mr. Adams regrets that this Squire’s staff should inconvenience him so frequently. Joseph
raises the issue of their bill, which again they cannot pay, and suggests that Mr. Adams write to
their new acquaintance requesting funds. The answer they receive, however, is that their
acquaintance has departed on a long journey. Mr. Adams is shocked, but Joseph says that he
had suspicions from the beginning, since there is a saying among footmen that “those Masters
who promise the most perform the least.” The Host then enters and chaffs the travelers for
having been duped. Mr. Adams frets about their bill and says that even if the Host trusts them to
pay it later, they live at such a distance that they might never find an opportunity to send the
money; paradoxically, the Host says that Adams’s admission that they might never pay has
made him trust them more, since every failure to pay a debt has so far been preceded by an
ironclad guarantee. The Host therefore waives the bill and sits down for a drink with Mr.
Adams while the lovers go off into the garden.
Chapter XVII.
The Host tells several stories of the false-promising Squire’s promising more than he meant to
deliver and gouging his victims as a result. The final story tells of the Host’s own career as
master of a ship and the false-promising Squire’s bogus promise to procure him an elevation to
the lieutenancy of a man of war. Mr. Adams regrets these evidences of the man’s bad character
but holds out hope for his redemption, especially given the signs that his face bears of “that
Sweetness of Disposition which furnishes out a good Christian.” The Host, with his wide
experience of the world, counsels against inferring a man’s character from his countenance. Mr.
Adams indignantly argues for his own wide reading as a form of worldliness and invokes
Socrates in behalf of his theory of moral physiognomy. This argument leads to a debate about
the relative merits of trade and the learned professions, but Joseph and Fanny soon interrupt,
and Adams and the Host part with less good humor than prevailed between them formerly.
Analysis.
Starting in Chapter XIII, when Joseph assents to Adams’s requirement that the marriage be
delayed until the formal pronouncement of the wedding banns, Fielding puts the Joseph-Fanny
romance plot on hold and focuses on Adams and the comedy of his innocence; that comedy
reaches a climax in the final chapters of Book II. Homer Goldberg points out how Fielding
designed the events of Book II to exhibit a progression from examples Adams’s everyday
absent-mindedness to increasingly dramatic evidence of his benevolent naïveté regarding
human nature. The ever-more-despicable behavior of those around him fails to dispel his
generous illusions until finally “the display of his essential simplicity culminates in his vain
defense of classical learning as the essential source of the knowledge of men.” When in Chapter
XVII Adams sits down with the Host and argues that the only knowledge worth having is found
in books, he finally states explicitly the unworldly attitudes that have been determining his
outlook all along.
Adams’s run-ins with Parson Trulliber and the false-promising Squire are each exemplary
instances of his innocent dealings with the world of affectation. In the case of Trulliber, Adams
encounters the epitome of the type of selfish clergyman to whom he has stood in contrast since
his discussion with Barnabas about the doctrines of Methodism. Trulliber would rather tend his
hogs than care for souls (indeed, he is better suited to the former task), and he treats Adams to
some truly wretched hospitality, gorging himself while giving Adams “a little of the worst Ale.”
Eventually the two parsons engage in a debate about the true nature of Christianity and the
relationship between faith and works, and it emerges that Trulliber believes that his duty as as
clergyman and a Christian is simply to believe certain religious tenets, not to conduct himself
according to the behaviors enjoined by those tenets. In professing immaculate Christian
principles but abstaining from the performance of charity toward his fellow-man, Trulliber
shows himself to be the quintessential hypocrite, a devotee of self-interest masquerading as a
paragon of virtue. Nor is Trulliber merely a corrupt clergyman; he is also a bully, a lover of
power who is given to brutal intimidation of his wife. His authority within the parish derives in
large part from his ability to lord it over his parishioners, all of whom “lived in the utmost Fear
and Apprehension of him.”
Trulliber’s vices, then, are reprehensible, but what should be noted is that they are, as one may
say, natural -- they are extensions of the ordinary human desire to acquire things, such as money
or power, for oneself. With the false-promising Squire the case is different and rather bizarre: if
Trulliber responds too negatively when Adams approaches him for aid, the false-promising
Squire approaches Adams on his own initiative and deceives him with a gratuitous display of
sham generosity. His sadistic foible is to counterfeit that quality of spontaneous benevolence
which is the substance of Adams’s ethics and which Adams so constantly expects to find in
those around him. The false-promising Squire is, then, as exemplary a hypocrite as Trulliber,
though in a stranger way. As Goldberg puts it, he engages in “motiveless mischief”; his
wickedness is unconventional in that it confers no obvious benefit on him, and as a result,
Adams takes a while to recognize and condemn it.
Only after the Host’s lengthy account of the Squire’s past wrongdoing does Adams concede that
“he is indeed a wicked Man,” though even then he protests that the Squire “hath in his
Countenance sufficient Symptoms of . . . that Sweetness of Disposition which furnishes out a
good Christian.” The Host’s rather worldly response, that to take people at face value in this
way is to invite deception, strikes Adams as too cynical, and it is telling that when the Host
invokes his world travels in support of his argument from experience, Adams counters by
invoking his own wide reading. Adams insists that his knowledge of books helps him to see the
world clearly, but when he cites Socrates on behalf of the false-promising Squire it becomes
clear to the reader that Adams’s literacy also has the potential to confirm the parson in his
chosen vision of reality.
We have now reached the midpoint of the novel, and it would appear that, in a sense, Mr.
Adams is incapable of learning: his adventures have not served to make him any more realistic
about the world, and experience washes off him like the pig-slop from Trulliber’s sty. In
another sense, of course, there is nothing that Adams needs to learn, as he already embodies
Fielding’s definition of goodness as active charity. Perhaps, however, Mr. Adams’s goodness
would be more effectual if he could incorporate some of the Host’s practical wisdom; after all,
the Host is no covetous misanthrope in spite of his sober realism, for he has just taken a risk on
Adams by extending credit to him when Adams has admitted how difficult it will be for him to
pay it back. Fortunately, Joseph, as Adams’s protégé, seems to be incorporating experience into
his parson’s Christian teaching rather effectively: he has suspected the Squire as a phony from
the start, and eventually he passes judgment on him with a maxim that is the fruit of the
accumulated wisdom of generations of footmen. Whereas at the beginning of the novel Joseph
could not believe that Lady Booby, being socially so superior, could ever condescend to
proposition her own servant, by now he has begun to look on the upper classes and the world
with an eye not cynical but definitely more experienced.
Book III, Chapters I through III.
Summary.
Chapter I.
Fielding again takes up issues of genre and begins by elevating biography over history.
Historians are always accurate in reporting circumstantial detail, but they are careless in their
evaluations of persons; thus, “Some represent[] the same Man as a Rogue, while others give
him a great and honest Character, yet all agree in the Scene where the Fact is supposed to have
happened; and where the Person, who is both a Rogue, and an honest Man, lived.” Biographers
have exactly the opposite priorities, presenting persons faithfully while occasionally mistaking
the where and the when. Fielding clearly sides with the biographers in this scenario, but he
reserves his highest praise for the authors of romances and novels, “who without any Assistance
from Nature or History, record Persons who never were, or will be, and Facts which never did
nor possibly can happen: Whose Heroes are of their own Creation, and their Brains the Chaos
whence all their Materials are collected.” These imaginative works are not bound to the
particulars of history, and they can be “Histor[ies] of the World in general,” expressing its
eternal truths. Accordingly, Fielding’s novel includes many instances of eternally recurring
human types: the Lawyer, the Wit, the Prude; and Fielding clarifies that none of these figures
corresponds to any one individual in real life. As he says, “I describe Men, not Manners; not an
Individual, but a Species.” Fielding’s goal is “not to expose one pitiful Wretch” in real life but
“to hold the Glass to thousands,” criticizing the common flaws of human nature. This
distinction, says Fielding, makes the difference between the libeler and the satirist.
Chapter II.
The companions, who are nearing their destination, walk until nightfall and then sit down to
rest. Mr. Abraham Adams notices a light, which he takes to be a ghost. When they hear voices
“agree[ing] on the Murder of anyone they met,” Adams brandishes his stick and advances on
the menacing lights until Joseph Andrews pulls him back and convinces him that they should
flee. During their flight Mr. Adams trips and rolls down a hill, luckily to no ill effect. After they
have crossed a great deal of countryside they arrive at a house, where a Man and his Wife offer
shelter and refreshments. Mr. Adams tells the story of his confrontation with the “evil Spirits,”
but he is interrupted by a knock at the door. During a tense interval, while the Man goes to
answer the door, Mr. Adams worries that an exorcism might be in order; the Man returns,
however, to inform them that Mr. Adams’s murderous ghosts are actually sheep-stealers, two of
whom the shepherds have apprehended, and the murder victims are sheep. Everyone then settles
down cheerfully before the fire, and the Man begins to probe his guests regarding their status.
Mr. Adams clarifies that Joseph is not his footman but his parishioner, and the Man puts to Mr.
Adams some literary questions designed to verify whether he is a real clergyman or not. Adams
holds forth at length on Æschylus and Homer, finally concluding, “The Heavens open’d, and
the Deities all seated on their Thrones. This is Sublime! This is Poetry!” The Man is by now
more than convinced of Mr. Adams’s authenticity as a clergyman and even wonders “whether
he had not a Bishop in his House.” Soon the women go off to bed, with the men planning to sit
up all night by the fire. In response to a request by the Man, Mr. Adams tells the story of
Joseph’s life, then asks the Man to tell the story of his own.
Chapter III.
The Man, who has introduced himself as Mr. Wilson, was born and educated as a gentleman. At
sixteen, following the death of his father, he took his inheritance and went to London,
“impatient to be in the World” and attain the character of “a fine Gentleman.” He learned how
to dress, dance, ride, fence, and so forth, before embarking on trumped-up “Intrigue[s]” with
several of “the finest Women in Town.” Mr. Adams condemns this “Course of Life” as “below
the Life of an Animal, hardly above Vegetation.” After two years, a confrontation with an
Officer of the Guards led Wilson to retreat to the Temple, where he lived among people who
pursued the frivolous life less convincingly than had his former companions: “the Beaus of the
Temple . . . are the Affectation of Affectation.” Wilson’s base new pleasures eventually brought
him a venereal disease, which in turn brought him a resolution of amendment. His swearing-off
of prostitutes soon compelled him, however, to satisfy his passion for women by keeping a
mistress, from whom however he soon parted upon discovering her inconstancy. After another
round of venereal disease, he debauched the daughter of a military gentleman; the young lady
soon began a moral and psychological decline that ended with her miserable death in Newgate
Prison.
After another disease and a couple more mistresses, Wilson joined a club of Freethinkers but
left in disgust after finding that the members’ conduct belied their own rationalistic ethical
code. He began instead to frequent playhouses, in which context he found the occasion to
remark that “Vanity is the worst of Passions, and more apt to contaminate the Mind than any
other.” He attempted to become a playwright, seeking aristocratic patronage in vain, and his
play was never performed. In need of money to pay his debts, he took a job doing translations
for a bookseller and in this line of work did so much reading and writing that he nearly went
blind and temporarily lost the use of his writing hand. He consequently lost this job and, after
using his earnings to buy a lottery ticket, was arrested by his tailor for debt. The lottery ticket
then returned £3,000, which Wilson however did not receive because he had sold the ticket to a
relative who now refused to share the prize with him. One day, while in prison, he received a
note from a lady named Harriet Hearty, the daughter of the man to whom he had sold the ticket;
Harriet informed him that her father had died, leaving her all his fortune, and that she thought it
right to send Wilson £200, which sum she had enclosed with the note. Wilson was delighted not
only to receive the money but especially to receive it from Harriet Hearty, for whom he had
long cherished a secret love. In their first meeting after his release from prison, he professed his
love, which he found the lady reciprocated, and they married shortly thereafter. Wilson took her
father’s place in the wine trade but soon began losing money at it due to his refusal to adulterate
his wine. Around this time he concluded that “the Pleasures of the World are chiefly Folly, and
the Business of it mostly Knavery; and both, nothing better than Vanity: The Men of Pleasure
tearing one another to Pieces, from the Emulation of spending Money, and the Men of Business
from Envy in getting it.” He then retired with his wife and their two children to the countryside,
where they have lived happily, except for the abduction of their eldest son by gypsies.
Analysis.
Continuing a trend that began in the episode of the false-promising Squire, the character of
Joseph deepens and matures in the course of Book III. Rather than passively absorb the buffets
of fortune, as he largely did throughout the first two books, Joseph now asserts himself more
readily, both dissenting from Mr. Adams's plans when appropriate and springing into physical
action against beatable adversaries. Thus, in the "ghost" sequence of Chapter II, the steady and
sensible Joseph checks Adams's impulse to charge the sheep-stealers, carries Fanny safely down
the slope that tumbled Adams, and guides his companions to a bridge when Adams would have
waded through the river. Joseph, then, has emerged as a prudent foil for his dreamy and
impetuous pastor.
The character of Mr. Adams likewise undergoes a shift of sorts during the transition between
Books II and III, but in his case the change occurs not so much in his personality per se as in
Fielding's presentation of it. Whereas previously Fielding has focused on the contrast between
Adams and the world, thereby endorsing his innocence over others' affectations, now he begins
to measure Adams against other men who are just as virtuous but more prudent, thereby
highlighting Adams's weaknesses and vanity. The first of these other virtuous men is of course
Joseph; the second is Mr. Wilson.
The story of Mr. Wilson's reformation after a misspent youth occupies the center of the novel
for good reason. As one critic has said, "the mature Wilson functions as the novel's central norm
of sensible humanity," and his fitness for this role is apparent in his conduct toward the three
strangers who show up on his doorstep after their encounter with the "ghosts": charitable yet
wary, Wilson welcomes the trio into his home but seeks a way of verifying that they are who
they say they are, and even then he only gradually warms to them as their good nature becomes
increasingly evident. He has seen "too much of the World to give a hasty Belief to Professions";
unlike Mr. Adams, Mr. Wilson has learned something from his experiences of the world. As
Homer Goldberg observes, Wilson's "satiric exposure of the moral state of the world as it is
forcibly points up the error of Adams's persistent naïve vision of it as it ought to be."
Wilson's biography presents "the World" with a capital "W": it is a survey of the classic vices
that characterize the urban lifestyle of affectation, sophistication, and sensuality. (This
Hogarthian "rake's progress" may also contain an autobiographical element, as the young
Fielding was himself a dissolute Londoner for several years before eloping with his beloved
wife.) Physical lust would appear to be the leading vice among these cosmopolitan types, if
Wilson's recurrent spells of venereal disease are any indication. Wilson's London career of
course contrasts with Joseph's in this regard, and Fielding indicates that this moral degradation
had its origins in Wilson's "early Introduction into Life, without a Guide," as he had no Parson
Adams to mentor him. Religious heterodoxy then compounded this faulty education, with the
young Wilson joining a club of freethinking deists and atheists. Like many frivolous young
men, Wilson kept expecting "Fortune" to smile on him, hence his purchase of the lottery ticket;
his long acquaintance with adversity, however, would teach him that redemption comes not
through luck but through charity, which Harriet Hearty helpfully embodied.
Wilson's journey, like Joseph's, takes him from town to country, from the life of folly and vice
to the life of chaste love and cheerful industry. The geographical symbolism is deliberate, for as
Martin C. Battestin remarks, "in a book whose satiric subject is vanity, provision had to be
made for a long look at London, always for Fielding the symbol of vanitas vanitatum." In their
rural life, it is true, the Wilsons can temper the classical ideal of detachment and solitude with
the Christian ethic of active benevolence, living out of "the World" and yet not abstaining
misanthropically from charitable deeds; their way of life provides Joseph and Fanny with an
example of how to settle down after marriage. Nevertheless, the abduction of the Wilsons'
eldest son demonstrates that vice knows no geographical boundaries: the country may be the
georgic site of contented retirement, but even here sin and sadness can intrude.
Book III, Chapters IV through VI.
Summary.
Chapter IV.
Mr. Abraham Adams speculates about the fate and identity of Mr. Wilson’s abducted son,
suggesting that he might now be a German adventurer or a Duke. Wilson replies that he would
know his son among ten thousand, due to the distinctive mark on the left side of his chest. Soon
the sun comes up, and Adams and Wilson rouse Joseph Andrews for a walk in the garden. The
garden, which Wilson tends himself, is functional rather than ornamental. Wilson explains the
family’s daily schedule and expresses his respect and affection for his wife and his devotion to
their children. Soon they go in to breakfast, where the Wilsons admire Fanny Goodwill’s beauty
and the guests commend the Wilsons’ charity toward their neighbors. Soon, however, a dog
belonging to the Wilsons’ eleven-year-old daughter comes limping in mortally wounded,
having been shot by the young Squire from the nearby manor. The Squire, apparently, is a petty
tyrant who routinely kills dogs, confiscates guns, and tramples crops and hedges.

Joseph and Fanny are eager to return home and have their wedding, so the travelers decline the
Wilsons’ dinner invitation and continue on their way. As they leave, Mr. Adams declares “that
this was the Manner in which the People had lived in the Golden Age.”
Chapter V.
As the travelers walk along, Mr. Adams and Joseph discuss the first part of Wilson’s story,
which Joseph heard before falling asleep. Adams designates Wilson’s public school education
as the source of all his youthful unhappiness: “Public Schools are the Nurseries of all Vice and
Immorality.” Joseph, says Adams, may attribute the preservation of his virtue to the fact that he
never attended a public school. Joseph protests, however, that Sir Thomas Booby attended a
public school and became “the finest Gentleman in all the Neighborhood.” No amount or kind
of training will alter a person’s basic nature, argues Joseph: “[I]f a Boy be of a mischievous
wicked Inclination, no School, tho’ ever so private, will ever make him good; on the contrary, if
he be of a righteous Temper, you may trust him to London, or wherever else you please, he will
be in no danger of being corrupted.” Mr. Adams continues to argue rather petulantly for the
superiority of private education, and Fielding attributes his zeal in this cause to something that
might be called vanity: “He thought a Schoolmaster the greatest Character in the World, and
himself the greatest of all Schoolmasters.”
Around noon they rest in a beautiful spot and unpack the provisions Mrs. Wilson gave them.
Among the food and wine they discover a gold piece, which Wilson evidently intended should
prevent their getting trapped in any more inns along their way. Mr. Adams, however, plans to
repay Mr. Wilson when the latter passes through Adams’s parish within the week.
Chapter VI.
Joseph discourses on the virtue of charity, which he says contributes infinitely more to a man’s
honor than does the acquisition of money or fine articles. In viewing an expensive painting, for
example, no one bears in mind the painting’s owner; when, by contrast, people discuss a good
deed such as redeeming a debtor from prison, they always emphasize the author of the deed.
Moreover, people often disparage others’ possessions out of envy, but “I defy the wisest Man in
the World to turn a true good Action into Ridicule.” Eventually Joseph looks up to see Mr.
Adams asleep and accordingly turns to canoodling with Fanny, albeit in a manner “consistent
with the purest Innocence and Decency.” Soon they hear a pack of hounds approaching, and a
hare, the dogs’ quarry, appears beside them. Fanny wants to catch the hare and protect it, but
the hare does not recognize her as an ally and goes on its way. Soon the hounds catch it and tear
it “to pieces before Fanny’s face, who was unable to assist it with any Aid more powerful than
Pity.” The capture happens to occur within two yards of Mr. Adams, with the result that some
of the dogs end up attacking the clergyman’s clothes and wig. Mr. Adams awakes and flees
before the dogs can taste his flesh, but the Master of the Pack sends the dogs after him. Joseph,
seeing his companion in distress, takes up his cudgel, an heirloom which Fielding describes
minutely in a mock-heroic passage, and hastens, “swift of foot,” to Adams’s assistance.
Fielding declines to characterize Joseph with an epic simile because no simile could be aequate
to “the Idea of Friendship, Courage, Youth, Beauty, Strength, and Swiftness; all which blazed
in the Person of Joseph Andrews.”
The hounds catch up with Mr. Adams, and Joseph beats them off one at a time until the Squire,
whom Fielding calls a “Hunter of Men,” finally calls them off. Fielding acknowledges the
humorously elevated diction in which he has related this incident when he concludes: “Thus far
the Muse hath with her usual Dignity related this prodigious Battle, a Battle we apprehend
never equalled by any Poet, Romance or Life-writer whatever, and having brought it into a
Conclusion she ceased; we shall therefore proceed in our ordinary Style with the Continuation
of this History.” The hunters, formerly amused by the spectacle of Joseph and Mr. Adams
contending with the hounds, now begin to worry about the injuries the hounds have sustained in
the combat. The Hunter of Men demands what Joseph meant by assaulting the dogs. Joseph
defends his actions, but all arguments cease when Fanny approaches and staggers the hunters
with her beauty. Soon it becomes apparent that only two dogs have sustained mortal wounds, so
the hunters’ anger subsides and the Hunter of Men invites the travelers to dinner.
Analysis.
Wilson's biography prompts Mr. Adams and Joseph to have a nature-versus-nurture debate
about how men acquire moral insight; the ensuing exchange provides further evidence both of
Adams's faulty ideas about human nature and of Joseph's increasing shrewdness and
confidence. Adams, it appears, has some unsound notions regarding the origins of virtue and
vice: in declaring public schools "the Nurseries of all Vice and Immorality," he implies that
moral character, for good or ill, derives from external conditioning, so that a proper moral
education entails sheltering boys from depravity and keeping them forever "in Innocence and
Ignorance." Such a theory hardly has room for the doctrine of Original Sin; one thing it can
accommodate, however, is Mr. Adams's high opinion of his own skill and importance as a
pedagogue: as Fielding observes, Adams's emphasis on the moral significance of education
owes much to his belief in the schoolmaster as "the greatest Character in the World, and himself
as the greatest of Schoolmasters." As if this reference to the parson's vanity were not enough to
render his arguments suspect, Homer Goldberg points out a discrepancy between Adams's
theory and his practice: whereas Adams here professes to consider the world at large to be
corrupt in the main, when he himself is abroad in the world he demonstrably expects that its
inhabitants will be as innocent and ignorant as the most sheltered private-school boy or as
Adams himself.
Joseph propounds a more cogent theory of moral education and in the process shows himself to
have a better command than his mentor of some of the most important themes of the novel.
Fundamentally, Joseph rejects Adams's premise of the universality of original innocence,
suggesting instead that while some boys are born with basically virtuous natures, others are
naturally vicious. External factors, including education, exert only limited influence on the
development of moral character, for "if a Boy be of a mischievous wicked inclination, no
School, tho' ever so private, will ever make him good; on the contrary, if he be of a righteous
Temper, you may trust him to London, or wherever else you please, he will be in no danger of
being corrupted." Joseph himself, having emerged immaculate from the cesspool of London, is
Exhibit A in support of this argument; nor does the case of Wilson, who eventually transcended
his corrupt environment (and after all had left his public school early), at all disprove it. Thus,
having previously excelled only in commonsensical matters, Joseph suddenly evinces superior
insight into human nature; his ability to overshadow the parson in the parson's own specialty,
namely education and moral philosophy, suggests that Fielding may be priming him to retake
center stage, which Adams has occupied since his entrance late in Book I.
Joseph is not infallible, however, and ensuing events belie his assertion that a good action defies
ridicule: the bizarre Squire whose hunting dogs harass Adams so relishes "everything
ridiculous, odious, and absurd in his own Species" that he does not hesitate to "turn even Virtue
and Wisdom themselves to Ridicule." Readers have often criticized the scene in which the pack
of hounds dismantles the "poor innocent" hare and then turns its attentions to the poor innocent
parson, on the grounds that the slapstick action goes beyond comedy to cruelty. Certainly the
Hunter of Men is barbaric in his valuation of dogs above humans and, later, in his pleasure in
subjecting Adams to a series of nasty practical jokes, and it may be tempting to conclude that
Fielding, insofar as he expects the reader to laugh along with the Hunter of Men, has descended
to barbarism as well. What seems more likely, however, is that Fielding did not in fact intend
for the dogs' attack on Adams to be humorous in itself (though whether it is humorous in the
manner of its telling is a separate issue, on which see more below); rather, the episode allows
Adams to recover some of the sympathy that he forfeited during the recent exposures of his
vanity and naïveté. If Adams's characteristic foible, usually endearing but recently exasperating,
has been his willingness to become a dupe and victim of the vicious world, here the vicious
world victimizes him so cruelly that the reader's sympathies cannot help but return to him. As
Goldberg puts it, "Here the world's baiting of Adams, which began with his entrance into the
Dragon Inn, is carried to its savage extreme." The Hunter of Men exemplifies the vices of the
world because, unlike most of the people who have victimized Adams and his companions, he
is not self-interested in the ordinary way; his pleasure, like that of the false-promising Squire
(only more darkly and violently), is to perpetrate mischief for its own sake.
Fielding tempers the unpleasantness of the incident, however, by rendering it in humorous or
burlesque diction. The battle with the hounds, in fact, constitutes the lengthiest application of
mock-epic diction in the entire novel; it spoofs elaborately a number of conventions of epic
combat, including the invocation of the Muse ("who presidest over Biography"), the Homeric
epithet ("the Plain, the young, the gay, the brave Joseph Andrews"), the minute description of
the hero's weapon ("It was a Cudgel of mighty Strength and wonderful Art," etc.), the brief
biographies of fallen warriors ("Ringwood the best Hound that ever pursued a Hare, . . .
Fairmaid, a Bitch which Mr. John Temple had bred up in his House," etc.), and, almost, the epic
simile ("Reader, we would make a Simile on this Occasion, but for two Reasons . . ."). All of
this ironical classicism exemplifies the Preface's definition of "burlesque" as "appropriating the
Manners of the highest to the lowest," and it does so more dramatically than does any other
burlesque passage in the novel. Whereas a more conventional burlesque passage would describe
a lowly human brawl in terms appropriate to heroic combatants (the hog's-blood battle is a good
example of this approach), the battle with the hounds takes burlesque to another level by using
the same heroic terms to describe sub-human combatants, a pack of dogs.
One of the effects of this verbal humor is to impart a sense of narratorial oversight: the
counterintuitively funny presentation of violent actions calls attention to Fielding's ability to
frame his tale, modulating his own and the reader's reactions to it, and thereby reminds us that
all events are under the novelist's control. In turn, the use of mock-epic diction implies the
presence of a benevolent designer, with Fielding functioning as a substitute deity who watches
over his characters even when they seem to be in the most danger. Aside from being funny,
then, Fielding's burlesque diction fits violent events into a comic frame and reassures the reader
that, notwithstanding the shocking depravity on display in this scene, providence has not ceased
to operate.
Book III, Chapters VII through XIII.
Summary.
Chapter VII.
Mr. Abraham Adams sits down to dinner with the Hunter of Men while Joseph Andrews and
Fanny Goodwill dine in the kitchen. The Hunter's has plan is to get both Adams and Joseph
drunk so that he can have his way with Fanny. Fielding summarizes the Hunter’s biography. He
received his education at home, where his tutor “had Orders never to correct him nor to compel
him to learn more than he liked”; at twenty he embarked on his grand tour of Europe, which he
treated less as an educational trip than as an opportunity to acquire French manners, clothes,
and servants. As an adult he has been distinguished by “a strange Delight which he took in
every thing which is ridiculous, odious, and absurd” in human beings, and he has collected
around him an entourage of misfits; visiting him now are “an old Half-pay Officer, a Player, a
dull Poet, a Quack-Doctor, a Scraping-Fiddler, and a lame German Dancing-Master.”

The Hunter’s odd guests perpetrate a number of cruel jests against Mr. Adams, until the
clergyman scolds the Hunter for violating the laws of hospitality in failing to protect his guest.
The Quack-Doctor is the last to take a shot at Adams, and he does so by giving pompous
speeches in mock-approbation of everything that Mr. Adams has said in defense of civility and
the clerical state. He then describes what he claims was “a favourite Diversion of Socrates,” a
ceremony in which Socrates would approach a throne that was flanked by a King and Queen,
deliver “a grave Speech, full of Virtue and Goodness, and Morality, and such like,” and seat
himself on the throne to enjoy a royal entertainment. The assembled company agrees to
duplicate the ceremony, with Mr. Adams playing the role of Socrates. The “throne” turns out to
be a tub of water covered by a blanket, and Adams gets soaked. Adams manages to dunk the
Hunter of Men several times by way of revenge before finding Joseph and Fanny and exiting
the house.
Chapter VIII.
The Hunter of Men sends his entourage in pursuit of the three travelers, primarily because of his
plans for Fanny, which he has so far failed to enact. The travelers reach an inn, where they meet
a Catholic Priest who discourses on the vanity of riches, concluding, “I have a Contempt for
nothing so much as for Gold.” The Priest then asks Mr. Adams for eighteen pence to pay his
reckoning; Adams is happy to oblige, but upon searching his pockets he finds that the Hunter
and his friends have stolen Wilson’s gold piece. The Priest, seeing that he will be unable to pay
his bill, decides not to stay the night; Adams and his companions, though no more able than the
Priest to pay their bill, decide to stay the night anyway.
Chapter IX.
The next morning Joseph awakes to hear the servants of the Hunter of Men knocking on the
door of the inn and inquiring after “two Men and a young Woman.” Joseph suspects what is
going on and denies that anyone answering that description is in the building. The Host,
however, answers in the affirmative, prompting the three travelers to throw on their clothes and
prepare to flee. In the standoff between the travelers and the servants, Joseph empties the
chamber-pot in the face of the Half-pay Captain, and the battle seems to be turning in the
travelers’ favor; the Host intervenes, however, and distracts Joseph while one of the servants
strikes him unconscious. The servants take advantage of this development to abduct Fanny and
tie Joseph and Mr. Adams to the bedposts.
Chapter X.
While conveying Fanny back to the Hunter of Men, the Poet and the Player each lavish
compliments on each other. The Poet says to the Player, among other things, “[E]very time I
have seen you lately, you have constantly acquired some new Excellence, like a Snowball.”
Each derogates his own profession, gallantly taking the blame for the mediocrity of the
contemporary theater, prompting the other to object that present company is a rare exception.
The cooperative flattery ends when the Player confesses that he cannot recite from memory one
of his own speeches from one of the Poet’s plays. The Player defends himself by noting that the
play was such a failure with the audience that its run only lasted one night.
Chapter XI.
Joseph despairs over the loss of Fanny, prompting Mr. Adams to lecture him on the reasonable
response to grief, which involves patience and submission. In order to demonstrate that he
sympathizes with Joseph, Adams enumerates Fanny’s good qualities and sketches a vision of
their happy life together, then observes, “You have not only lost her, but have reason to fear the
utmost Violence which Lust and Power can inflict upon her.” Joseph must bear in mind, Adams
continues, that “no Accident happens to us without the Divine Permission, and that it is the
Duty of a Man and a Christian to submit.” Understandably, Joseph protests that Adams has
failed to comfort him.
Chapter XII.
On the way back to the Hunter’s house, the Captain and Fanny argue about whether the
corrupted luxury that awaits her is a superior or inferior fate to her prospective life with Joseph.
The Captain then advises Fanny to cooperate with the Hunter, who will treat her better if he
does not have to deflower her by force. When a horseman approaches, Fanny begs for
assistance but the Captain convinces him that she is not a victim but an adulterous wife. Soon
two more horsemen, armed with pistols, approach, and one of them recognizes Fanny. The
horsemen stop to confront the servants, and while they are arguing the carriage arrives that the
horsemen are escorting. The gentleman in the carriage, who turns out to be Peter Pounce on his
way back to the Booby country seat, takes Fanny into the carriage and officiously orders the
Captain to be conveyed as a prisoner behind. The carriage continues to the inn, where Fanny
has a joyful reunion with Joseph. Peter Pounce greets Mr. Adams, who naïvely holds the
hypocrite in high esteem, and thus has occasion to observe the clergyman’s spectacularly
disordered appearance: not only is he half-dressed, but he is showing the effects of having been
in the line of fire when Joseph threw the chamber-pot.
Upon seeing the Captain a prisoner, the Player and the Poet make their exit, fleeing on the
Poet’s horse. Joseph gives the Captain “a most severe drubbing,” after which the servants allow
the Captain to go free, thwarting Peter Pounce’s intention of conveying the prisoner imperiously
to the local Justice of the Peace. The servants have brought with them the horse that Mr. Adams
left behind him at the inn, and Adams insists that Joseph and Fanny ride the horse for the rest of
the journey. Joseph, however, insists that Adams ride the horse, and they reach a stalemate that
Peter Pounce breaks by inviting Adams into the carriage. Joseph and Fanny find Adams’s horse
too refractory, so they switch horses with someone else, whereupon the group departs.
Chapter XIII.
Mr. Adams and Peter Pounce observe the landscape, with Adams valuing it for its natural
beauty and Pounce calculating its monetary value. They then move on to the subject of charity,
which Pounce considers “a mean and Parson-like Quality”; “the Distresses of Mankind,” he
claims, “are mostly imaginary.” He claims that he is not as wealthy as people take him to be,
that he is barely solvent, because “I have been too liberal of my Money.” He then asks Mr.
Adams what other people have said that he his worth, and Adams replies, “I have heard some
aver you are not worth less than twenty thousand Pounds.” Without confirming or denying this
estimate, Pounce declares that he does not care what the world thinks of him and his fortune. He
boasts that he has acquired all his wealth on his own, inheriting none of it, and remarks that
many heirs of estates fail to manage their money properly and might end up in situations as
pitiful as that of Mr. Adams, “glad to accept of a pitiful Curacy for what I know.” When Pounce
congratulates himself for his generosity in sharing a carriage with “as shabby Fellows as
yourself,” Mr. Adams exits the carriage with as much dignity as he can muster, though he
forgets his hat, and walks beside Joseph and Fanny for the final mile to Booby Hall.
Analysis.
The Quack-Doctor turns out to be devilishly insightful when he designs his Socratic prank to
appeal to Adams's moral gravity, his devotion to Greek literature and philosophy, and of course
his vanity; as critic Homer Goldberg remarks, "An invitation to present one of his treasured
sermons would be welcome in any circumstance; to do so in the role of Socrates before an
imaginary royal court . . . is irresistible." Much as the prank exposes the parson's familiar
foibles, however, it is one part of a long episode, the general effect of which is surely to
increase the reader's protective sympathy for Adams and indignation for his tormentors.
Following the scene of Adams's "roasting," however, Joseph continues his return to the
spotlight. The abduction of Fanny is the first time the young couple have been menaced since
they reunited in Book II, and it is a more serious and frightening attack than was the attempted
rape that heralded Fanny's entrance into the story. In the earlier incident, the danger to Fanny
(still unnamed at that point) came to the reader's attention only as Mr. Adams and his crabstick
were about to spring into action; here we learn of the Hunter's criminal designs long before he
enacts them and long before Joseph and Adams have caught on, and we are aware of the great
importance of Fanny's welfare to Joseph's strand of the plot. The shift toward greater suspense
regarding the fate of Fanny is consistent with the general raising of the stakes in regard to the
lovers' plot and with the refocusing of the narrative onto the lovers.
In terms of characterization, though, more remains to be said about Fanny as a magnet for
attempted sexual assaults, of which the current episode is the second of three. Unlike Joseph
when he is under assault from Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop, Fanny never even attempts to
extricate herself from these encounters on her own; instead, she awaits the intervention of
various male protectors, at least one of whom will always be providentially on hand. The
thematic point of these episodes of near-rape would seem to involve the distinction Fielding
would like to draw between lust on the one hand and virtuous physical love on the other. Only
the violent characters ever try to force Fanny to gratify their desires, and forcible gratification
appears to be the only kind of sexual gratification these characters can imagine.
Many readers have considered Fanny a less than satisfactory character; her passivity and
attractiveness to sexual predators may appear to serve the plot rather too conveniently. At best,
her psychology must be said to be uncomplicated. Fielding seems to have designed her to be a
perpetual victim, for she not only outdoes Mr. Adams in naïveté but adds an element of chronic
passivity as well. To the former point, she made herself vulnerable to the first assault when she
accepted a strange man’s offer to accompany her on a country road at night; it was a rather
stunning error that emphasized her compliant nature. She is, as Fielding said in Book II,
Chapter XII, “extremely bashful.” Individual readers may decide whether her thoroughgoing
docility makes Fanny too simply a damsel in distress or whether, on the contrary, the flatness of
her characterization arises realistically from the simplicity that Fielding suggests is an attribute
of true goodness.
Peter Pounce, whose welcoming Adams into his coach leads to a comical exchange between
innocence and hypocrisy, is more sharply characterized, and he provides a vital contrast to Mr.
Adams. Peter has a dilemma: fearing the schemes and envy of others, he feels compelled to
downplay his own fortune; simultaneously, however, he is proud of his success as a part-time
finance capitalist and likes to hear people marvel at how well he has done for himself. His
default pretense, in which he begins the scene, is a show of contentment with his "little" fortune.
As the discussion proceeds, however, Adams's mention of charity triggers Peter's defensive
mode, and he begins to rail against charity and wonder aloud where people imagine he can have
gotten all the money they seem to think he has. Adams, characteristically, assumes that Peter is
complaining in good faith and, thinking to commiserate with him, confides that he never found
the reports of the steward's wealth credible, given that "your Wealth is your own Acquisition."
The parson has blundered into a sore spot by reminding Peter that his wealth is new rather than
inherited, deriving from business rather than from land, and thereby not especially prestigious.
It only gets worse from there, as Adams sees Peter frown over the estimate of his fortune at
£20,000, construes Peter's unhappiness as arising from modesty (in fact, Peter is worth well
over £20,000), and assures him that he personally never thought him worth half that much. The
exasperated hypocrite then casts off his pretense of contented poverty and derides both Mr.
Adams and the decadent gentry class, revealing his true nature in the process. Peter's attitude to
money is dehumanizing: it causes him to be savage toward the poor and prompts him to speak
in such locutions as "how much I am worth," as if the value of a man's life could be measured in
monetary units. Mr. Adams, by contrast, shows that he has no clue of the value of money; it is a
form of ignorance that he has displayed on many previous occasions but perhaps never so
appealingly as here. In the presence of his polar opposite, a hypocritical miser, Adams stands
out in his most essential qualities and we are reminded that, for all its drawbacks, his
unworldliness remains a positive value and a moral touchstone.
Book IV, Chapters I through VIII.
Summary.
Chapter I.
Lady Booby returns to Booby Hall, to the relief of the parish poor who depend on her charity.
Mr. Abraham Adams receives a more heartfelt welcome, however, and Joseph Andrews and
Fanny Goodwill enjoy a similarly kind reception. Adams takes his two companions to his home,
where Mrs. Adams provides for them.

Fielding gives a record of the emotional turbulence Lady Booby has endured since the departure
of Joseph from London. She eventually resolved to retire to the country, on the theory that this
change of scene would help her to conquer her passion for Joseph. On her first Sunday in the
country, however, she goes to church and spends more time leering at Joseph than attending to
Parson Adams. During the service, Adams announces the wedding banns of Joseph and Fanny,
and later in the day Lady Booby summons the clergyman for a chat.
Chapter II.
Lady Booby criticizes Mr. Adams for associating with a footman whom Lady Booby dismissed
from her service and for “run[ning] “about the Country with an idle Fellow and Wench.” She
rebukes him for “endeavouring to procure a Match between these two People, which will be to
the Ruin of them both.” Mr. Adams defends the couple, but Lady Booby takes offense at his
emphasize on Fanny’s beauty and orders Adams to cease publishing their banns. (A couple’s
wedding banns must be published three times before a marriage can take place.) When Adams
demands a reason for this action, Lady Booby denounces Joseph as a “Vagabond” whom she
will not allow to “settle” in her parish and “bring a Nest of Beggars” into it. Adams advises her,
however, of what he has learned from Lawyer Scout, “that any Person who serves a Year, gains
a Settlement [i.e. legal residence] in the Parish where he serves.” The clergyman indicates that
he will marry the hopeful couple, in spite of Lady Booby’s threat to have him dismissed from
his curacy, and that their “being poor is no Reason against their marrying.” Lady Booby tells
him that she will never allow him in her house again, which punishment Mr. Adams accepts
with relative calm.
Chapter III.
Lady Booby summons Lawyer Scout and demands that he supply the legal justification for her
resolution “to have no discarded Servants of mine settled here.” In order to oblige her, Scout
makes a hair-splitting distinction between settlement in law and settlement in fact, saying that if
they can demonstrate that Joseph is not settled in fact, then Mr. Adams will have no standing to
publish Joseph’s wedding banns. If, however, Joseph manages to get married, the situation
would change: “When a Man is married, he is settled in Fact; and then he is not removable.”
Scout promises to persuade Mr. Adams not to publish the banns, so that Lady Booby will, with
the help of the obliging Justice Frolick, be able to remove both Joseph and Fanny from the
parish. Fielding then reveals that Scout acts as a lawyer without having the proper
qualifications.
Chapter IV.
Lady Booby endures further emotional turbulence, and on Tuesday she goes to church and
hears Mr. Adams publishing the second of Joseph and Fanny’s wedding banns. Upon returning
home she learns from Mrs. Slipslop that Joseph and Fanny have been brought before the
Justice. Lady Booby is not entirely pleased with this news, because “tho’ she wished Fanny far
enough, she did not desire the Removal of Joseph, especially with her.” While Lady Booby is
considering how to act, a coach and six drives up containing her nephew, Mr. Booby, and his
wife, Pamela. Lady Booby is hearing of Mr. Booby’s marriage for the first time. The new-
minted Mrs. Pamela Booby is, of course, the former Pamela Andrews.
Chapter V.
Mr. Booby’s servants soon begin to ask after Joseph, who has not corresponded with Pamela
since his dismissal from Lady Booby’s. The servants soon apprise Mr. Booby of Joseph’s
situation, and Mr. Booby resolves to intervene and liberate Joseph before Pamela finds out what
has happened. He arrives on the scene just as Justice Frolick, an acquaintance of his, is about to
send Joseph and Fanny to Bridewell Prison. Mr. Booby demands to know what crime they have
committed; he reads the deposition and finds that Joseph and Fanny stand accused of having
stolen a twig from Lawyer Scout’s property. When Mr. Booby objects, Justice Frolick takes
him aside and explains that the Constable will probably let the prisoners escape but that the
accusation of theft is the only way that Lady Booby can “prevent their bringing an Incumbrance
on her own Parish.” Mr. Booby gives his word that Joseph and Fanny will never encumber the
parish, and the Justice delivers the couple into Mr. Booby’s custody, burning the mittimus.
While Joseph gets dressed in a suit of Mr. Booby’s clothes, the Justice invites Fanny to settle
with Joseph in the Justice’s own parish. Mr. Booby then takes Joseph and Fanny in his own
coach, and they drive back to Lady Booby’s; on the way they pick up Mr. Adams when they
meet him walking in a field. Mr. Booby reveals that he has married Pamela, and everyone
rejoices. Upon their arrival back at Booby Hall, Mr. Booby reintroduces Joseph to Lady Booby,
explaining that he expects her to receive Joseph and treat him with respect as a member of the
family. Lady Booby complies delightedly, but she refuses to receive Fanny. Joseph prepares to
meet Pamela and Lady Booby, and Fanny goes with Mr. Adams to the latter’s home.
Chapter VI.
Joseph and Pamela have a tearful reunion, and Joseph recounts all the adventures he had after
leaving London. In the evening he reluctantly agrees to stay the night in Booby Hall rather than
joining Fanny and Mr. Adams. Lady Booby retires to her room and, with help from Mrs.
Slipslop, defames both Pamela and Fanny. They then discuss Joseph and whether Lady Booby
degrades herself in being attracted to him. Slipslop defends Joseph passionately against the
charge of being “coarse” and avers that she wishes she herself were a great lady so that she
could make a gentleman of him and marry him. Lady Booby tells Mrs. Slipslop that she is “a
comical Creature” and bids her good-night. In the morning Joseph visits Fanny at the Adams
household, and they settle on Monday as their wedding date.
Chapter VII.
Fielding explains why it is that women often discover in love “a small Inclination to Deceit”:
from childhood, women are taught to fear and avoid the opposite sex, so that when as adults
they begin to find him agreeable, they compensate by “counterfeit[ing] the Antipathy,” as Lady
Booby has done with respect to Joseph. She “love[s] him much more than she suspect[s],”
especially now that she has seen him “in the Dress and Character of a Gentleman,” and she has
formed a plan to separate him from Fanny. She convinces Mr. Booby to dissuade Joseph from
marrying Fanny on the grounds that the alliance would make it impossible for the Boobys to
gentrify the Andrews family. Mr. Booby assents to this plan and approaches Joseph, who resists
his brother-in-law’s suggestions even when Pamela joins the argument.
Fanny walks in an avenue near Booby Hall and meets a Gentleman with his servants. The
Gentleman attempts to force himself on Fanny and, when he fails, continues on to Booby Hall
while leaving a Servant behind to persuade Fanny to go home with the Gentleman. This Pimp,
failing in his office, makes an attempt on Fanny himself. Fortunately, Joseph intervenes before
the Pimp can get very far and eventually beats him off. During the scuffle the Pimp tore at
Fanny’s clothing, uncovering her “snowy” bosom, which entrances Joseph once he has time to
notice it. He averts his eyes, however, once he perceives her embarrassment, and together they
proceed to the Adams household.
Chapter VIII.
Just before the arrival of Joseph and Fanny, Mr. and Mrs. Adams conclude an argument about
whether Mr. Adams should, for the sake of the family, have avoided offending Lady Booby. In
Mrs. Adams’s opinion, the clergyman should oblige the Lady by ceasing to publish the banns;
Adams, however, “persist[s] in doing his Duty without regarding the Consequence it might
have on his worldly Interest.” Joseph and Fanny enter and sit down to breakfast. Joseph
expresses his eagerness to be married, and Adams warns him to keep his intentions in marriage
pure and not value Fanny above the divine will: “[N]o Christian ought so to set his Heart on any
Person or Thing in this World, but that whenever it shall be required or taken from him in any
manner by Divine Providence, he may be able, peaceably, quietly, and contentedly to resign it.”
Just as Adams has finished saying this, someone enters and tells him that his youngest son has
drowned. Joseph attempts to comfort Adams by employing many of the clergyman’s own
arguments about the conquering of the passions by reason and grace, but Adams is in no mood
to listen. Before long, however, the weeping Mr. Adams meets his young son running up to the
house, not drowned after all. As it turns out, the child was rescued from the river by the same
Pedlar who delivered the travelers from one of the inns where they could not pay their bill. Mr.
Adams rejoices to have his son again and greets the Pedlar with genuine gratitude. Once things
have calmed down, Adams takes Joseph aside to repeat his advice not to “give too much way to
thy Passions, if thou dost expect Happiness,” but after all this Joseph has lost patience and
objects that “it was easier to give Advice than to take it.” An argument ensues as to whether
Joseph’s love for Fanny is of the same pure and elevating sort as Mr. Adams’s parental love for
his son, or whether intense marital love “savours too much of the Flesh.” Mrs. Adams interrupts
this conversation, objecting that Mr. Adams does not enact his own disparagement of marital
love: not only has he been a loving husband, but “I declare if I had not been convinced you had
loved me as well as you could, I can answer for myself I should have hated and despised you.”
She concludes, “Don’t hearken to him, Mr. Joseph, be as good a Husband as you are able, and
love your Wife with all your Body and Soul too.”
Analysis.
The opening chapters of Book IV lay the groundwork for the novel’s final conflict and eventual
resolution: the principal “good” characters have returned to the place of their origin, and their
primary adversary, Lady Booby, arrives back on the scene as well (along with Slipslop, her
subaltern and imitator). Book IV will turn out to be a more unified book than the preceding
three, in terms of both the place and the time of the action, as Fielding confines the events to the
Boobys’ parish and specifies the passage of a discrete number of days. The overall effect gives
a sense of coherent dramatic conflict, rather different from the diffuse picaresque plotting of
Books I through III.
A burgeoning cast of secondary characters also lends heft to the building action: the family of
Mr. Adams enters the story for the first time, as do the newly married Mr. Booby and Pamela.
The Pedlar turns up again, a Lawyer and Justice materialize, and an embodiment of the vacuous
fashionable world appears in the person of a would-be Bellarmine (whose name will turn out to
be Beau Didapper). These secondary characters, whose ranks will swell in succeeding chapters,
do more than fill out the stage; they also increase the tension between Lady Booby and the
lovers, as Lady Booby schemes to get all of these originally neutral players on her side: Mr.
Booby’s amiability, Pamela’s snobbery, Lawyer Scout’s unscrupulousness, and Mrs. Adams’s
fear of poverty all present her with opportunities for driving apart the lovers and neutralizing
their advocate, Mr. Adams; she even has plans for the selfish lust of Didapper. The Pedlar, of
course, remains an instrument of providence, and he will continue to perform this role in the
coming chapters.
The episode in which Mr. Adams again counsels Joseph against passionate attachments and
then, hearing of his own son’s supposed drowning, fails to practice what he has preached
reveals another dimension of Adams’s fallibility, though whether his weakness makes him more
or less sympathetic will be up to the eye of the beholder. This scene has had a precursor in Book
III, Chapter XI, when Adams, bound with Joseph to a bedpost, “comforted” his young friend by
urging him to give up the “Folly of Grief” and resign himself contentedly to the cosmic plan
that is about to subject “the prettiest, kindest, loveliest, sweetest” Fanny to “the utmost Violence
which Lust and Power can inflict”; the parson even construed the impending rape of Fanny as
an act of divine justice, a punishment of Joseph for the sin of repining. The scene at the bedpost,
then, revealed Adams as an inhuman sermonizer, failing to enact the spontaneous, sympathetic
good nature that has generally distinguished him. He has a rationalistic side to his personality; it
is the part of him that responds to the literature of classical stoicism with its injunction to
transcend all human feelings and attachments.
In the opposition between the sternly sententious clergyman and the warm and disconsolate
lover, the former surely forfeits a great deal of the reader’s sympathy. In Book IV, Chapter VIII,
however, Fielding revisits this opposition and may qualify it somewhat, depending on one’s
interpretation. Here, Adams again admonishes his parishioner to “divest himself of all human
Passion”; this time he is concerned that Joseph is too eager to get married, and he warns that if
sexual avidity is the motivation then Joseph is sinning, while if anxiety for Fanny’s welfare is
the motivation then Joseph ought to be putting his trust in providence. Adams instructs Joseph
to prepare himself to accept even the loss of his beloved Fanny “peaceably, quietly, and
contentedly,” “[a]t which Words one came hastily in, and acquainted Mr. Adams that his
youngest Son was drowned.” Suddenly, the preacher who insisted that anyone who indulges in
exorbitant grief is “not worthy the Name of a Christian” begins lamenting his own personal
loss. Like the biblical Abraham, Mr. Abraham Adams has to confront the idea that the divine
will has demanded the death of his beloved son; in both cases, the apparent necessity of the
son’s death is a test of the father’s faith and resignation. Joseph urges the parson to follow his
own advice, resign himself, and look forward to a reunion in heaven; Adams, with unconscious
irony, refuses this counsel, so it is doubly fortunate that Dick eventually turns out not to have
drowned at all. As usual, however, Adams fails to see when his weaknesses have been exposed,
and he quickly snaps back to his formal sermonizing mode.
Mr. Adams’s conspicuous failure by the lights of his own code has emboldened Joseph: the
young man points out his mentor’s inconsistency and observes that it is “easier to give Advice
than to take it.” Adams’s rather petulant response to this challenge of his authority sharpens the
issue for the reader, who must decide whether the parson has revealed that all his supposed
virtue is in fact just a hypocritical penchant for arrogating a position of moral authority. Despite
how neatly this scene seems to fit into Fielding’s dominant theme of the exposure of pretense,
however, few readers are likely to take the condemnation of Adams as far as this; Homer
Goldberg articulates a sensible position when he observes that "[a]lthough the incident is
similar in structure to Fielding's unmaskings of hypocrisy, the paradox of Adams's behavior is
not that he is worse than he pretends to be but that he is better than he knows." Indeed, the
passive-resignation brand of Christianity that Adams has recommended in his stoical
sermonizing is by no means identical with the active charitable love of neighbor that he
elsewhere advocates and consistently enacts; his extraordinary goodness takes its distinctive
character not from his erudition or from his reason but rather from his natural and spontaneous
affections, of the sort that he keeps censuring in Joseph. The proper attitude toward Mr. Adams
is probably the one that Mrs. Adams espouses near the end of the scene when, after expressing
at length her affection for the husband who is more generous that he will admit, she undercuts
his teaching authority by saying, “Don’t hearken to him, Mr. Joseph.” As Maurice Johnson
suggests, Fielding likely means for readers to follow Mrs. Adams in regarding the parson as
thoroughly lovable but not always a reliable moral philosopher.
Book IV, Chapters IX through XVI.
Summary.
Chapter IX.
Lady Booby meets the Gentleman who assaulted Fanny Goodwill and immediately conceives
plans of using him to get Joseph Andrews away from Fanny. In order to give this Gentleman,
Beau Didapper, access to his intended victim, Lady Booby takes her guests to see the Adams
household, promising the amusing spectacle of a large family subsisting on a meager income.
Mrs. Adams is embarrassed to receive her upper-class visitors without having tidied up the
house for them. The Beau flirts with Fanny, and Lady Booby compliments the young son, Dick
Adams, on his appearance. When she asks to hear him read, Mr. Abraham Adams issues the
command in Latin, confusing Dick, but eventually they understand each other and Dick
consents to read.
Chapter X.
Dick reads the story of Leonard, a married man, and Paul, his unmarried friend. Paul pays a
lengthy visit to Leonard and his wife and discovers that the couple are prone to have vigorous
disputes, often concerning the most trivial matters. Paul always maintains neutrality during
these disputes, but one day in private talks he tells each spouse that he or she may be right on
the merits of the argument but ought to yield the point anyway, “for can any thing be a greater
Object of our Compassion than a Person we love, in the wrong?” This Doctrine of Submission
has such good effects on the couple that they begin separately to appeal to Paul for advice
during every disagreement. One day, however, they have an argument in his absence and begin
to compare notes regarding the counsel he has given each of them; soon they discover
numberless “Instances, in all which Paul had, on Vows of Secrecy, given his Opinion on both
sides.” The couple are now united in their anger toward the two-faced Paul, who returns to find
both husband and wife suddenly cold toward him. Paul figures out quickly what has happened,
and he and Leonard have a confrontation, the conclusion of which is preempted by an event that
interrupts Dick’s reading of the story.
Chapter XI.
Beau Didapper makes a move on Fanny, prompting Joseph to box him on the ear. A melee
ensues, which Mr. Booby finally breaks up. In the aftermath, Lady Booby, Mr. Booby, and
Pamela Andrews Booby all suggest that Fanny’s virtue was hardly worth defending and that
Joseph’s marriage to her would shame the family. Joseph leaves with Fanny, “swearing he
would own no Relation to any one who was an Enemy to her he loved more than all the World.”
After all the visitors have left, Mrs. Adams and their eldest daughter scold the clergyman for
advocating for the young couple. Suddenly Joseph and Fanny return with the Pedlar to invite
the Adamses to dine at a nearby alehouse.
Chapter XII.
The Pedlar has been researching the Booby family and has discovered that Sir Thomas bought
Fanny from a traveling woman when Fanny was three or four. After the dinner at the alehouse,
he offers to reveal to Fanny who her parents are. He tells a story of having been a drummer with
an Irish regiment and coming upon a woman who thereafter lived with him as his mistress.
Eventually she died of a fever, but on her deathbed she confessed having stolen and sold a child
during a time when she was traveling with a band of gypsies. The buyer was Sir Thomas, and
the original parents were a couple named Andrews who lived about thirty miles from the
Squire. Everyone reacts strongly to this information; Mr. Adams falls on his knees and gives
thanks “that this Discovery had been made before the dreadful Sin of Incest was committed.”
Chapter XIII.
Lady Booby retires to her room early, throws herself on her bed, and endures “Agonies of Love,
Rage, and Despair.” Mrs. Slipslop arrives and commiserates her, informing her of Beau
Didapper’s plan to abduct Fanny. Lady Booby dismisses Slipslop with an order to report back
when the abduction of Fanny has been executed. Alone, Lady Booby goes back to talking to
herself about her degrading passion for Joseph and the absurdity of his preference for Fanny.
Soon, however, Slipslop returns with the news that Joseph and Fanny have been revealed to be
siblings. Lady Booby rushes off to tell Pamela, who disbelieves the report because she has
never heard that her parents had any children other than herself and Joseph. Lady Booby
summons Joseph, Fanny, and the Pedlar to the Hall, where the Pedlar repeats his tale. Mr.
Booby persuades everyone to withhold judgment on the story until the next day, when Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews will arrive to meet their daughter and son-in-law.
Chapter XIV.
Late at night, Beau Didapper goes off in search of the sleeping Fanny and accidentally jumps
into bed with Slipslop, who takes the Beau to be Joseph. Once the participants discover their
mistakes, Slipslop decides to pretend that Didapper has scandalized her by making this attempt,
hoping thereby to “restore her Lady’s Opinion of her impregnable Chastity.” Her cry of
“Murther! Murther! Rape! Robbery! Ruin!” brings the barely clad Adams to the rescue, but in
the dark he takes the soft-skinned Didapper to be the woman and the bearded Slipslop to be the
man, so he attacks Slipslop and allows Didapper to make his escape. He scuffles with Slipslop,
and when Lady Booby arrives to find them together in bed and in states of undress, she
naturally misinterprets the situation. She soon spots Didapper’s laced shirt and diamond
buttons, however, and together they sort out what has happened. Lady Booby laughs and
departs, and Mr. Adams soon follows suit, but instead of returning to his own bed, he
accidentally enters Fanny’s room. Fanny is sleeping so deeply that she does not wake up, so she
and the clergymen share the bed innocently until morning. Joseph enters the chamber at dawn,
whereupon the two bedfellows awake and are surprised to see each other. Joseph is briefly
angry at the clergyman, but Adams explains the events of the night before, and Joseph
concludes that Adams simply “turned right instead of left.” He then leads Mr. Adams back to
his room.
Chapter XV.
Joseph returns to Fanny’s room after she has dressed, and they vow that in case they should turn
out really to be siblings, they will both remain perpetually celibate. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
arrive after breakfast, and when Mr. Booby broaches the topic of the stolen child, Mr. Andrews
denies that he and his wife ever lost a child in that manner. Lady Booby calls the Pedlar to
repeat his story, however, and it prompts Mrs. Andrews to claim Fanny as her child. Mrs.
Andrews then explains to her husband that she bore him a daughter when he was a soldier away
in Gibraltar and that the gypsies stole the child and replaced it with a sickly boy, whom she
soon named Joseph. The Pedlar asks Mrs. Andrews whether the boy had a distinctive mark on
his chest; she answers in the affirmative, and Joseph unbuttons his coat to show the evidence.
At the mention of the birthmark Mr. Adams begins to remember his conversation with Wilson,
but the Pedlar makes the crucial connection, assuring Joseph “that his Parents were Persons of
much greater Circumstances than those he had hitherto mistaken for such.” It so happens that
Wilson has just arrived at the gates of Booby Hall for his promised visit to the parish. A servant
apprises him of the connection that has just been discovered, and Wilson hastens to the room to
embrace Joseph as his long-lost son. Joseph, after things have been explained to him, falls at the
feet of his new father and begs his blessing.
Chapter XVI.
Mr. Booby invites everyone to accompany him and Pamela to their country home, since Lady
Booby is now too bitter over the loss of Joseph to entertain any company. They all comply, and
during the ride Joseph arranges with Wilson that he and Fanny will marry after Mrs. Wilson is
with them. Everyone arrives safely, and Saturday night brings Mrs. Wilson. Soon the happy day
arrives, and Fielding describes the wardrobe and wedding arrangements in some detail. The
events of the wedding night he leaves to the reader’s imagination, though he makes clear in
general terms that it is a rousing success.
Soon the Wilsons return home with the newlyweds in tow. Mr. Booby awards Fanny a fortune
of £2,000, with which Joseph purchases a small estate near his father’s; Fanny manages the
dairy and is soon on her way to producing their first child. Mr. Booby also awards Mr. Adams a
living of £130 per year and makes the Pedlar an excise-man. Lady Booby soon returns to
London, where card games and a young soldier allow her to forget Joseph.
Analysis.
Fielding’s great theme of appearance versus reality dominates the last chapters of the novel,
obtruding itself in a couple of spectacular plot developments. The climactic sequence in which
both Joseph and Fanny turn out to have been involved in separate but linked gypsy-changeling
incidents is of course the most consequential deployment of the theme in the entire novel; by far
the funniest, however, is the episode in which a number of the overnight guests at Booby Hall
find themselves in the wrong beds.
In addition to being good screwball comedy, the nocturnal confusion sequence epitomizes the
entire story and culminates the novel’s pervasive sexual comedy. As Hamilton Macallister
remarks, “Each character re-enacts the role he plays in the novel. It is Didapper’s fate not to get
his woman, Mrs. Slipslop’s to lust unsatisfied. . . . It is the fate of Lady Booby to come too late
and misunderstand, Adams to rush to the help of a woman in distress and cause worse
confusion, Fanny to see her virtue in apparent extreme danger. The humor is not mere slapstick,
as it is sometimes elsewhere in the novel; always it is true to character.” One may add that it is
Adams’s fate to endure humiliations: as with his fall into Trulliber’s sty and his run-ins with
hog’s blood and a chamber pot, the parson here endures severe humiliations but, as ever, he
successfully washes off the sordidness of the ordeal. Detected in the beds of two women who
are not his wife, Adams earns the condemnation of Mrs. Slipslop (of all people), who
hypocritically calls him “the wickedest of all Men,” and the laughter of Lady Booby; he even
endures the suspicions of Joseph and Fanny, whose virtue he has cultivated and defended but
who in the harsh light of morning wonder whether he has not finally joined the long line of
Fanny’s would-be debauchers. Through it all Parson Adams remains, in the words of Homer
Goldberg, “transcendentally comic,” though as Goldberg further observes, the scene of Joseph
momentarily sitting in judgment of his mentor and then “mellow[ing] into indulgent
superiority” continues the process of the younger man’s asserting himself against Adams and
supplanting him as protagonist.
Beau Didapper, whose mistaking of Slipslop’s chamber for Fanny’s initiates the hi-jinx, plays
an interesting role in dramatizing the theme of pretense. In his repulsive effeminacy he
exemplifies the vanity of fashionable society, its essential hollowness and enervation: like
Bellarmine but with less success, he attempts to lure a woman with the enticements of wealth
and social elevation. In his physical person he is dandyish and diminutive, so little threatening
that when he attempts to force himself on Fanny she manages, for once, to fight off her attacker
on her own. Her resistance forces him to assign the work of her seduction to a servant -- an
abject admission of weakness, not at all the same thing as the Hunter of Men’s sending his
servants to bring Fanny where he himself plans to assault her. Only Didapper’s extreme conceit
allows him to believe that he could successfully impersonate Joseph and seduce Fanny; to the
reader, who appreciates the gulf between Joseph’s masculinity and Didapper’s effeminacy, the
notion is risible. For all the Beau’s ludicrousness and corruption, however, he is consummately
acceptable to polite society. Simon Varey points out the euphemistic delicacy with which
Didapper leaves his servant to “make [Fanny] any Offers whatever”; whatever else he is,
Didapper is Lady Booby’s “polite Friend,” an emissary from fashionable or “polite” society.
The comedy of appearance and reality reaches its climax with the revelations of the respective
origins of Joseph and Fanny; not only do the two lovers turn out to be other than they were
thought to be, but in plot terms the main structure is a reversal of perceptions and expectations.
To the former point, it is interesting to re-read the novel in the knowledge of Joseph’s real
parentage: such details as the precise wording of Fielding’s introduction of the hero (“Joseph
Andrews . . . was esteemed to be the only son of Gaffar and Gammer Andrews”) show the
novelist keeping up the fiction but being careful to say nothing he will have to contradict later.
For readers who have some familiarity with romance conventions, of course, Fielding may
effectively have given the game away when Wilson mentions (with Joseph conveniently asleep)
the kidnapping of his eldest son and the son’s convenient identifying birthmark. Other markers
have been present all along; as in fairy tales, a fair complexion is an index of gentility, and
Betty the chamber-maid once argued for Joseph’s high birth on the basis of his white skin. If
Joseph is a gentleman in disguise, then, he has certainly been hiding in plain sight.
With respect to the final movement of the plot, the revelation of Fanny’s having been born to
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews initially makes it seem that, in addition to battling Lady Booby, the
lovers have lost the support of providence and their friends; as Goldberg points out, “even
Adams rejoices at the prevention of their marriage.” Their predicament, which seems to be
growing more dire, is in truth progressively ameliorating, as the discovery of Fanny’s parentage
leads to the discovery of Joseph’s parentage, and both these discoveries ultimately contribute to
the happiness and prosperity of the lovers. This drastic reversal, which owes much to the plots
of such classical dramatists as Mr. Adams’s beloved Æschylus, enhances the impact of the
lovers’ eventual bliss by making it seem fortuitous despite the fact that most readers will have
been confident of the happy outcome from the first news of Joseph’s marital aspirations.
Character List
Joseph Andrews
A handsome and virtuous young footman whom Lady Booby attempts to corrupt. He is a
protégé of Mr. Adams and the devoted but chaste lover of Fanny Goodwill. His adventures in
journeying from the Booby household in London back to the countryside, where he plans to
marry Fanny, provide the main plot of the novel.
Mr. Abraham Adams
A benevolent, absent-minded, impecunious, and somewhat vain curate in Lady Booby’s country
parish. He notices and cultivates Joseph’s intelligence and moral earnestness from early on, and
he supports Joseph’s determination to marry Fanny. His journey back to the countryside
coincides with Joseph’s for much of the way, and the vibrancy of his simple good nature makes
him a rival of Joseph for the title of protagonist.
Fanny Goodwill
The beautiful but reserved beloved of Joseph, a milkmaid, believed to be an orphan. She
endures many unsuccessful sexual assaults.
Sir Thomas Booby
The recently deceased master of Joseph and patron of Mr. Adams. Other characters’
reminiscences portray him as decent but not heroically virtuous; he once promised Mr. Adams a
clerical living in return for Adams’s help in electing Sir Thomas to parliament, but he then
allowed his wife to talk him out of it.
Lady Booby
Sir Thomas’s widow, whose grieving process involves playing cards and propositioning
servants. She is powerfully attracted to Joseph, her footman, but finds this attraction degrading
and is humiliated by his rejections. She exemplifies the traditional flaws of the upper class,
namely snobbery, egotism, and lack of restraint, and she is prone to drastic mood swings.
Mrs. Slipslop
A hideous and sexually voracious upper servant in the Booby household. Like her mistress, she
lusts after Joseph.
Peter Pounce
Lady Booby’s miserly steward, who lends money to other servants at steep interest and gives
himself airs as a member of the upwardly striving new capitalist class.
Mr. Booby
The nephew of Sir Thomas. Fielding has adapted this character from the “Mr. B.” of Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela; like Richardson’s character, Mr. Booby is a rather snobbish squire who
marries his servant girl, Pamela Andrews.
Pamela Andrews
Joseph’s virtuous and beautiful sister, from whom he derives inspiration for his resistance to
Lady Booby’s sexual advances. Pamela, too, is a servant in the household of a predatory Booby,
though she eventually marries her lascivious master. Fielding has adapted this character from
the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
Mr. Andrews
The father of Pamela and, ostensibly, Joseph.
Mrs. Andrews
The mother of Pamela and, ostensibly, Joseph.
Two Ruffians
Highwaymen who beat, rob, and strip Joseph on the first night of his journey.
Postilion
Lends Joseph his greatcoat when Joseph is naked following the attack by the Ruffians.
Mr. Tow-wouse
The master of the inn where Joseph boards after being attacked by the Ruffians. He intends to
lend Joseph one of his own shirts, but his stingy wife prevents him. Later he is discovered in
bed with Betty the chambermaid.
Mrs. Tow-wouse
The frugal, nagging wife of Mr. Tow-wouse.
Betty
A chambermaid in the inn of Mr. and Mrs. Tow-wouse. Her initial care of Joseph bespeaks her
basic good nature, but she is also lustful, and her association with him ends badly.
Mr. Barnabas
A clergyman who never passes up a drink and halfheartedly attends Joseph during his recovery
from the attack by the Ruffians.
Surgeon
Belatedly addresses the injuries Joseph sustained during his attack by the Ruffians.
Bookseller
A friend of Mr. Barnabas, declines to represent Mr. Adams, author of several volumes of
sermons, in the London book trade.
Tom Suckbribe
The Constable who fails to guard an imprisoned Ruffian and may have some financial incentive
for failing in this office.
Leonora
The reclusive inhabitant of a grand house along the stage-coach route, a shallow woman who
once jilted the hard-working Horatio for the frivolous Bellarmine and then was jilted in turn.
Horatio
An industrious lawyer who intended to marry Leonora but lost her to the wealthy and
flamboyant Bellarmine.
Bellarmine
A Frenchified cavalier who values Leonora’s beauty enough to steal her away from Horatio but
who finally rejects her when her father refuses to supply a dowry.
Leonora's Father
A miserly old gentleman who refuses to bestow any money on his daughter during his life and
thereby causes her to lose Bellarmine as a suitor.
Leonora's Aunt
Leonora’s chaperone during the period of her courtship by Horatio and then Bellarmine;
encourages Leonora to pursue her financial self-interest in choosing a mate.
Mrs. Grave-airs
A snobbish stage-coach passenger who objects to traveling with the footman Joseph but turns
out to be the daughter of a man who was once a lower servant.
Sportsman
Encounters Mr. Adams while out shooting one night; extolls bravery when conversing with
Adams but flees the scene when the cries of a distressed woman are heard.
The Justice
A local magistrate who does not take his responsibilities very seriously. He handles the case of
Mr. Adams and Fanny when Fanny’s attacker accuses them of having beaten and robbed him.
Mr. Wilson
A gentleman who, after a turbulent youth, has retired to the country with his wife and children
and lives a life of virtue and simplicity. His eldest son, who turns out to have been Joseph, was
stolen by gypsies as a child.
Mrs. Wilson
The wife of Wilson. She once redeemed him from debtor’s prison, having been the object of his
undeclared love for some time.
Pedlar
An apparent instrument of providence who pays one of Mr. Adams’s many inn bills, rescues
Mr. Adams’s drowning son, and figures out the respective parentages of both Joseph and
Fanny.
Mrs. Adams
The wife of Mr. Adams and mother of his six children, prone to nagging but also appreciative
of her husband’s loving nature.
Parson Trulliber
An entrepreneurial and greedy clergyman, more dedicated to hog farming than to the care of
souls, who refuses to lend Mr. Adams money for his inn bill.
Mrs. Trulliber
The downtrodden wife of Parson Trulliber.
Hunter of Men
An eccentric and rather sadistic country gentleman who sets his hunting dogs on Mr. Adams,
allows his friends to play cruel jokes on him, and attempts to abduct Fanny.
Captain
One of the Squire’s friends, abducts Fanny on the Squire’s orders but is himself taken prisoner
by servants of Lady Booby.
Player
One of the Squire’s friends, a failed actor who pursues Fanny on the Squire’s orders but flees
when the Captain is taken prisoner.
Poet
One of the Squire’s friends, a failed playwright who pursues Fanny on the Squire’s orders but
flees when the Captain is taken prisoner.
Quack-Doctor
One of the Squire’s friends; comes up with a Socratic practical joke that exploits Mr. Adams’s
pedantry.
Priest
Discourses on the vanity of riches before asking Mr. Adams for money to pay his inn bill.
Lawyer Scout
Tells Mr. Adams that Joseph has worked long enough to gain a settlement in Lady Booby’s
parish, but then becomes a willing accomplice in Lady Booby’s attempt to expel Joseph and
Fanny.
Justice Frolick
The local magistrate who cooperates with Lady Booby’s attempt to expel Joseph and Fanny
from her parish.
Beau Didapper
A guest of Lady Booby’s, lusts after Fanny and makes several unsuccessful attempts on her.
Pimp
A servant of Beau Didapper’s, attempts to persuade Fanny to accept his master’s advances and
then makes a few attempts on his own behalf.
Dick Adams
A son of Mr. and Mrs. Adams, nearly drowns in a river but is rescued by the Pedlar. He then
reads the story of Leonard and Paul to his parents’ guests.
Leonard
A married man who argues frequently with his wife while entertaining his friend Paul in their
home. Like his wife, he eventually accepts Paul’s advice always to yield in disputes, even and
especially when he knows himself to be right.
Leonard's Wife
The wife of Leonard, with whom she argues frequently while they are entertaining his friend
Paul in their home. Like her husband, she eventually accepts Paul’s advice always to yield in
disputes, even and especially when she knows herself to be right.
Paul
Leonard’s friend, separately advises both Leonard and Leonard’s wife to adhere to the
“Doctrine of Submission.”