Joseph Andrews/Shamela

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was a man of the world. Though Fielding became a jurist in the last years of his short life he knew the corrupt, sexy and violent England of the reign of George II. In "Joseph Andrews" and his later, longer novel "Tom Jones" we join a hero on a romp through merry olde England! Joseph Andrews is the reputed brother of Pamela Andrews being employed as a footman in the home of Lady Booby the widow of Sir Booby (the names are hilarious in this novel-for instance there is "Peter Pounce"!)When Lady Booby dismisses him after her failed seduction of the innocent lad he is forced to leave her employ. Joseph is befriended by the poor curate Abraham Adams who is going to London to sell a book of his sermons. Adams is a Sancho Panza figure who has six children and a wife back at home. He is involved in countless battles, misunderstandings and hilarious situations in inns and before judges! Adams is like an innocent Adam prior to the Fall of Man. He is a good old soul who seeks to help Joseph and the latter's illiterate love Fanny Goodwill. All comes out well in the end as Joseph and Fanny are wed and we learn the history of their infancy. We learn many surprises about them which I won't share with anyone who is reading this review prior to perusing the novel for the first time! Fielding is adept at humor, sexual situations and violent Keystone Kops varieties of mock battles! He was a fan of Cervantes and Andrews resembles an English Don Quioxote. Fielding enjoyed being the omniscent narrator often interjecting his thoughts on everything from marriage, the British social structure, warfare, human nature and the joys of true love. Fielding's novel is a comment on Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" epistlatory novel of 1740 in which the pious servant Pamela writes home to her parents about her abduction, rape and eventual marriage to a Lord B. Fielding thought the virtuous Pamela to be a bit sickening and so satirized that lady in his "Shamela" and Joseph Andrews. Joseph is the supposed brother of Pamela who appears in the Fielding novel. What did Richardson think of this "stealing" by Fielding of his famous heroine? The characters are typecast showing no growth or development as would be the case in later novels. Dickens was greatly influenced by Fielding whose careful descriptions of characters was a lesson well learned by the great Victorian writer. Joseph Andrews will take the reader back to the days of English inns and ale houses, rural roads and great country estates. It says much to our age about human nature which never changes. Henry Fielding is a great early English novelist and his Joseph Andrews will always remain as a classic of the novelist's difficult art

This fast-paced comic novel was written as a parody of another 18th century classic, the immensely popular Pamela. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, was a best selling novel by Fielding's comtemporary, Samuel Richardson. (Please see my other reviews for more about this). Although the language and social customs have changed in the 200 plus years since this book was written, there is enough universality to the comedy that modern readers won't mind missing a few of the jokes. Although having read Pamela first will help you get some of the inside humor, Joseph Andrews can be read on its own as well. Fielding uses Richardson's more serious morality tale as a jumping-off point for a pretended sequel, in which Pamela has a brother who encounters many of the same situations as his more famous sister. While Pamela was pursued by an amorous and unscrupulous landowner, Joseph is chased by lecherous females who can't believe that he is serious about saving himself for marriage to his childhood sweetheart. The humor comes from the gender reversal, and from Fielding's no-holds-barred spoof of the manners (and lack thereof) of the fashionable upper classes. Joseph is a clear-headed, intelligent young man of the servant class, whose social superiors just can't stop being ridiculous at every opportunity. I won't go into plot details-they are mostly of the standard farce variety anyway. But the scenes and dialog are often so hilarious that it doesn't matter what the pretext is, you just have to suspend all critical judgement and laugh. P.S. Shamela is included in this edition. It's a shorter spoof of Pamela, written as a bawdy series of letters in which the supposedly chaste and innocent heroine reveals her darker side. Not on a par with Joseph Andrews, but still pretty funny.

When readers come to JOSEPH ANDREWS--at least outside of a class on the 18th century novel, they usually have heard that this novel by Henry Fielding is funny, sort of an early Keruoac's On The Road. And while it is funny--a closer analogy might be to Hope and Crosby's On the Road films--its less obvious humor lies in its sharp satire, an understanding of which requires a bit of understanding how to place this book in its proper historical and cultural milieu. To begin with, Fielding wrote JOSEPH ANDREWS when novel writing was still very nearly a brand new genre. The only models he had were from classical antiquity and a few more recent innovators like Swift and Samuel Richardson. Fielding felt that his efforts were so new that he had to justify them, which he did in the often overlooked and unread "Preface" to the book. Reading this preface sheds some much needed light on the genesis of his novel. Fielding notes here that he wrote JOSEPH ANDREWS according to what he saw as the models first used by the classic ancient poetry writers. They wrote mostly poems and epic poems. What Fielding was writing was a genre unknown to them: prose fiction. Fielding thus tries to draw an analogy between what he was writing and what these ancients had written: "Now, a comic romance is a comic epic-poem in prose." Since Fielding clearly saw JOSEPH ANDREWS as a comic romance, it made sense to him that he should follow the strict unities of time and place that the ancients followed in their epic poems. But one often overlooked irony is that this stern self-reminder from his own preface he then abandoned wildly, often, and at the drop of a hat. Thus, for his contemporary audience who had more than a passing acquaintance with classical training, Fielding gets his JOSEPH ANDREWS off with a satirical bang. The book's plot itself defies explanation. It involves lost heirs, children stolen at birth, secret birthmarks, beatings that somehow leave no bruises: and all these occur fairly early on. The events are so convoluted and over the top that it is difficult to read them or remember them in their listed sequence. Yet, Fielding had good reason to believe that these wildly unbelievable events were precisely what his audiences wanted, since both Swift and Pope were still living and their respective satires much read and appreciated. Fielding chose to write on the book's title page that JOSEPH ANDREWS was "written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote." With that subtle hint, Fielding feels free to allow his hero to go off tilting at every object in his path but windmills. This tilting results in the kind of slapstick humor that most readers mean when they talk about how "funny" the book is. Yet, Fielding knew that humor could and should have a more serious aspect, which he saw as sober satire. For him, as for Swift, satire meant holding society up to a crooked mirror--sort of the kind that one sees at fun houses--and exposing by crooked exaggerati

So I was getting ready to reread Don Quijote (1605)(Miguel de Cervantes 1547-1616) in the excellent Burton Raffel translation and as I was looking for information about the book and author, saw repeated references to Fielding's Joseph Andrews. I'd read his Tom Jones a couple of years ago and found it kind of tough sledding, but when I stumbled upon this one at a library book sale for a quarter, it seemed a stroke of destiny.The parallels with Don Quijote are readily apparent. First of all, the book consists of a series of humorous travel adventures; second, the travellers involved seem too innocent to survive in the harsh world that confronts them. When Joseph Andrews, the naive footman of Lady Booby, deflects the amorous advances of both her Ladyship and Slipslop, the Lady's servant, he is sent packing. Upon his dismissal, Joseph, along with his friend and mentor Parson Adams, an idealistic and good-hearted rural clergyman, who essentially takes the physical role of Sancho Panza but the moral role of Quijote, sets out to find his beloved but chaste enamorata, Fanny Goodwill, who had earlier been dismissed from Lady Booby's service as a result of Slipslop's jealousy. In their travels they are set upon repeatedly by robbers, continually run out of funds and Adams gets in numerous arguments, theological and otherwise. Meanwhile, Fanny, whom they meet up with along the way, is nearly raped any number of times and is eventually discovered to be Joseph's sister, or maybe not.. The whole thing concludes with a farcical night of musical beds, mistaken identities and astonishing revelations.I've seen this referred to as the first modern novel; I'm not sure why, in light of it's obvious debt to Cervantes. But it does combine those quixotic elements with a seemingly accurate portrayal of 18th Century English manners and the central concern with identity and status do place it squarely in the modern tradition.At any rate, it is very funny and, for whatever reason, seemed a much easier read than Tom Jones. I recommend it unreservedly.GRADE: B+

I loved this book. The adventures of Joseph Andrews are colourful and riotous. Highly recommended! Shamela, however, is a lesser work. It is a bawdy caricature of Samuel Richardson's "Pamela". Amusing, but slight.