Joseph Andrews

Characters

Parson Adams

Although the title of the novel comes with the name of Joseph, Abraham Adams is the center
of interest in the novel. The readers are more involved in the old foolish Parson and his
encounters with the inhuman, callous, hypocritical, and vain people around him. He is a
comic, but hugely appealing figure. He is also an outstanding good man, a notoriously
difficult thing to portray. An ideal Christian Parson Adams is a Quixotic figure. He is absent-
minded. He leaves for London to sell his sermons but leaves the precious manuscripts behind
and does not discover the fact till he has accomplished half the journey. He has three sources
of vanity: his self-conceit, his pride in his sermons and his being a school teacher.

Fanny

As with Joseph, Fanny's outward beauty is matched by her inner qualities. She has sensibility,
sweetness, and gentility; in short, she is the perfect object for Joseph's love, and the way in
which she immediately takes to the road in search of Joseph after hearing of his plight testifies
that she too has a depth of feeling all too rare in this novel. Yet she also possesses a deep
sense of modesty; and, in all honesty, one must admit that Fanny is a little too perfect. But
part of her charm is in the way Fielding uses her in his comic contrasts. Whether we are
seeing Mrs. Slipslop huffily "forgetting" the name of this "impertinent" girl, or Lady Booby
plagued to distraction by the mention of Fanny's beauty, the emphasis is on Fielding's satire of
hypocrisy rather than on Fanny's pristine goodness itself.

Pamela Andrews

Pamela is a character who first appeared in the novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson. She is
famous everywhere for her virtue. Joseph Andrews believes that Pamela is his biological
sister, and his own chaste, determined behavior makes him similar to Pamela in many ways
(although Joseph’s adventures tend to have more absurdity to them). Although the narrator
mentions Pamela’s virtue many times, the praise she receives is so excessive that it suggests
her behavior may be an act, rather an example of model behavior.

Leonora

Leonora is the protagonist of a story-within-the-story that a woman tells in a coach. She is

Betty is the maid at the inn where Joseph Andrews is taken after he is gravely injured during a
robbery on the road. When her boss, Mr. Tow-wouse, refuses to help Joseph, Betty often
takes it upon herself to do something, demonstrating how sometimes people without
significant means are nevertheless more generous than richer people.

Mr. Barnabas

Mr. Barnabas is a clergyman who has supposedly come to Mr. Tow-wouse’s inn in order to
give last rites to the gravely injured Joseph Andrews, but he seems more interested in
enjoying Mr. Tow-wouse and Mrs. Tow-wouse’s hospitality, putting off his visit to Joseph as
long as he can. Mr. Barnabas is just one of many religious characters in the story who seems
to enjoy earthly pleasures more than his faith indicates he should.

Themes

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.

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.

Social class

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

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

Sources of the Ridiculous (vanity and hypocrisy)

According to fielding the only source of ridiculous is affectation which has two streams
(vanity and hypocrisy) which make the people pretend a false character in order to win the
attention and the admiration of others. But hypocrisy puts us on an attempt to avoid criticism
by riding our wrong vice under the appearance of its opposite virtue. In fielding opinion the
vanity is nearer to truth and is less harmful and less amusing than the discovery of hypocrisy
which is more surprising and harmful to the society, example : Lady Booby pretended that
she is sad, and isolated herself in the room after her husband's death , where as she was
playing cards with her friends, this is (social hypocrisy). Fielding view, that the clergymen
and common people should follow the model of Christ in practicing charity and goodness. He
thinks that true faith is not show by words but by action.