Header overlay
Patrick Welland, Henry Fielding - Slightly Foxed Issue 29

A Terrifying Business

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a previous school I was not going to waste my time and new freedom by studying A levels when I could do more exciting things, such as being thrown out of pubs for drinking weak beer under age. But although student and college were glad to see the back of each other, I had one regret - no more English lectures with genial Mr Butler, the single teacher for whom my rigid code of sloth made an exception.

The study books that year were Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, both illustrating, as Mr Butler patiently explained, the use of irony. I enjoyed Austen’s gentle ridicule of the Gothic novel, but Joseph Andrews, tracing the travails of a virtuous and impecunious servant making his way from London to Shropshire with a bumbling, eccentric parson at his side, was an even more unexpected treat. At the time, I was under the spell of Jack Kerouac’s beat epic On the Road and dreamed of crossing the US in a battered Chevy amid a fog of marijuana. Now here was another anarchic road book, but written 200 years earlier and a great deal funnier. I took a copy with me for the next halt on my own road – three months at a college in France, where I did even less work and had a marvellous time – and it has been a friend ever since.

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams is a good-hearted eighteenth-century frolic full of billowing breasts and bellowing squires, yet it masks a serious message. It was published in 1742, seven years

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a previous school I was not going to waste my time and new freedom by studying A levels when I could do more exciting things, such as being thrown out of pubs for drinking weak beer under age. But although student and college were glad to see the back of each other, I had one regret - no more English lectures with genial Mr Butler, the single teacher for whom my rigid code of sloth made an exception.

The study books that year were Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, both illustrating, as Mr Butler patiently explained, the use of irony. I enjoyed Austen’s gentle ridicule of the Gothic novel, but Joseph Andrews, tracing the travails of a virtuous and impecunious servant making his way from London to Shropshire with a bumbling, eccentric parson at his side, was an even more unexpected treat. At the time, I was under the spell of Jack Kerouac’s beat epic On the Road and dreamed of crossing the US in a battered Chevy amid a fog of marijuana. Now here was another anarchic road book, but written 200 years earlier and a great deal funnier. I took a copy with me for the next halt on my own road – three months at a college in France, where I did even less work and had a marvellous time – and it has been a friend ever since. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams is a good-hearted eighteenth-century frolic full of billowing breasts and bellowing squires, yet it masks a serious message. It was published in 1742, seven years before Fielding’s Tom Jones, and its origins lie in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1). Pamela was the then hugely popular epistolary story of a chaste servant who marries her master. Offended by its moral sanctimony, Fielding mocked the book in An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews. Less than a year later, still feeling mischievous, he had a second dig with Joseph Andrews in which the eponymous hero appears as Pamela’s equally chaste brother working as a manservant for the vampish Lady Booby. For Booby, Joseph is a tempting prospect indeed: ‘legs and thighs formed in the exactest proportion, shoulders broad and brawny . . . hair displayed in wanton ringlets, his teeth white and even. His lips full, red and soft.’ Such charms are too potent to resist and she attempts to seduce him. But, guided by his sister’s rectitude and intent on preserving his ‘virtue’, Joseph rejects her advances, which leads to his dismissal from her London property. ‘Your virtue!’ the frustrated Booby explodes. ‘Have you the assurance to pretend that when a lady demeans herself to throw aside the rules of decency, in order to honour you with the highest favour in her power, your virtue should resist her inclination? That when she had conquered her own virtue, she should find an obstruction in yours?’ Mystified by his ejection, Joseph sets out to return to his home in Shropshire where he hopes to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Fanny. Fanny, of course, is poor, beautiful, artless and virginal. At this point readers, especially those who saw the alluring Ann-Magret playing Booby in Tony Richardson’s 1977 film of the book, start losing sympathy with such a feeble vessel as Joseph. Fielding is aware of this. So instead of sustaining the ludicrous collision of youthful chastity with not so youthful lust, he uses it as a launch pad for a meandering plot that takes us on a rollicking tour d’horizon of rural Georgian England in all its vibrant squalor. And what a tour it is. Here are gypsies and stolen babies, mistaken identities, bedroom mix-ups, kidnaps, disputes intellectual and physical, misunderstandings and cruel practical jokes. Here, too, are corrupt lawyers, quack doctors, tyrannical landowners, hypocritical churchmen, besotted beaux, dodgy innkeepers and termagant wives. Cudgels are brandished, drubbings delivered and chamber pots – full – hurled. At the centre of all this bucolic mayhem stands the magnificent Parson Adams, one of the great comic figures in English literature. His cassock bursting from underneath his tatty greatcoat, his wig askew, unworldly, absent-minded, generous and immune to affectation, Adams is always ready to think the best of people and amazed – then outraged – when they prove to be charlatans. He is tolerant and forgiving, yet he is never afraid to use his fists or cudgel in defence of the weak. Fielding’s exuberant adventures are now more widely known on the screen than in the book, most notably thanks to Tony Richardson’s 1963 film of Tom Jones, and have produced the cliché of the Georgian ‘romp’. But at the time of publication, Joseph Andrew was a controversial innovation. Describing the work as a ‘comic epic-poem in prose’, Fielding says in his preface: ‘this kind of writing . . . I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’. It is certainly the first great modern picaresque novel in English literature, although the author acknowledges that his book is ‘Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote’. Despite tilting at Richardson’s pious heroine, Fielding was a deeply moral man in a largely amoral age. He was a talented playwright who pointed his indignant quill at religious intolerance and political chicanery, annoying the corrupt Walpole administration so intensely it introduced the 1737 Licensing Act to gag him. Fielding, moreover, was tolerant of human frailty at a time when often brutish living conditions spawned brutish behaviour. As a Bow Street magistrate, he was known for his fairness and honesty, and he campaigned for the abolition of public hangings. This benevolent spirit shines through Joseph Andrews. The author punctures hypocrisy and vanity among the high and low, but never loses his humanity. As he says in his preface: ‘The only source of the true ridiculous is affectation.’ He reassures us:

Perhaps it may be objected to me that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind into this work. To which I shall answer: First, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of human actions and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be found here, are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty, or foible . . . Thirdly, that they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule but detestation. Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure at that time on the scene; and lastly, they never produce the intended evil.

Fielding insists that he describes ‘not men, but manners; not an individual but a species’. And in Parson Adams he created a conflation of all the human characteristics he finds admirable. ‘I have made him a clergyman’, he says, ‘since no other office could have given him so many opportunities of displaying his worthy inclinations.’ We first meet Adams, the local curate in Joseph’s Shropshire village, early in Book 1 where he is described as ‘a man of good sense, good parts, and good nature’. To add to our pleasure, however, he is also ‘as entirely ignorant of the ways of this world, as an infant just entered into it could possibly be. He was generous, friendly and brave to an excess; but simplicity was his characteristic.’ Simplicity here means a good and generous heart, not simplicity of mind. For Adams, though easily duped, is a learned scholar and ‘perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages’. His unkempt dress, the way he snaps his fingers in emotion, his sudden exclamations and delight in dispute bring to my mind the untidiness, physical tics and prolixity of Samuel Johnson, if not the doctor’s sterner nature. But Johnson would not have liked to be associated with Joseph Andrews. He once contemptuously observed that the difference between his friend Samuel Richardson and Fielding was that of ‘a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate’. Adams disappears for the next eleven chapters while Joseph sets out for home. He is waylaid by thieves, left stripped and bleeding in a ditch, ignored by the uncharitable occupants of a coach in a parody of the Good Samaritan and finally delivered to an inn where the flinty-hearted landlady Mrs Tow-wouse upbraids her husband for taking in a ‘naked vagabond’. Adams, who is on his way to London hoping to sell some of his sermons, now arrives at the inn, meets Joseph and – having discovered that he has left his sermons behind – decides to join the young man on his journey. On the way, he rescues a young girl from an attacker. Surprise, surprise, it is Fanny on her own way to find Joseph. With the three central characters in place, and barely a penny between them, we are off on the road. The trio’s consequent scrapes bring them into contact with a gallery of ne’er-do-wells intent on exploiting their indigence and gullibility. Fanny, a prey to sexual predators, is abducted. Adams is regularly ridiculed and made sport of. When Joseph is not canoodling demurely with Fanny or lamenting her disappearance, he is felling opponents with his fists. Their tormentors are the kind of harsh everyday characters depicted by Fielding’s friend Hogarth. For, despite Fielding’s exaggerated touch, this is a hard fictional world reflecting the cruel reality of his age. As the Australian critic Robert Brissenden observes in an introduction: ‘Through the blindness, venality, selfishness and sometimes deliberate malice of other people they are threatened time and time again with physical injury, separation, completely unjust imprisonment or even death. To be poor, unknown and unprotected in eighteenth-century England could be a terrifying business.’ But though the human landscape is frequently vindictive or threatening, Fielding softens it with irony and humour. Adams and his friends invariably emerge victorious, if occasionally aided by a cudgel. The travellers also encounter fleeting kindnesses, notably in the case of Mr Wilson in whose home they take shelter. Wilson is a former dissolute who has turned his back on ‘bustle, noise, hatred, envy and ingratitude’ and is central to the resolution of the plot. Now living quietly in the countryside with his wife and children, he declares that ‘the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly and the business of it mostly knavery; and both nothing better than vanity’. This is one side of Fielding’s still modern message. The other, exemplified by Adams, is that the only sane course for a rational being is to explore life with as much good humour and concern for others as possible. The message is Christian, but not priggish. Indeed, it is delivered with a vigour that left some early readers deeply offended. The plot, needless to say, ends satisfactorily due to the usual number of fortuitous coincidences. As Parson Adams says at the end: ‘Hic est quem quaeris, inventus est . . .’ Or, as I would have known without checking if I had not lazily ditched Latin before technical college, ‘Here is the one you are seeking; he is found.’ Thank you, Mr Butler.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Patrick Welland 2011


About the contributor

Patrick Welland is a retired journalist who still loves the road. Although he has never crossed the States in a battered Chevy he finds solace for this failure in riding his motorcycle.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.