Joseph Andrews Reading Order

Joseph Andrews (1742) by Henry Fielding is the first novel Fielding wrote and the text in which he defined his theory of what the novel should be — a 'comic epic poem in prose,' descended from Homer's comic mode and organized around action, character, and the exposure of human affectation and hypocrisy. The novel began as a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) — Fielding was offended by Richardson's moral program and by the hypocrisy he saw in Pamela's virtue, and he invented Pamela's fictional brother Joseph as a way of exposing that hypocrisy. Joseph Andrews, a handsome footman, resists the advances of his employer Lady Booby (a female counterpart to Richardson's Mr. B), is dismissed, and sets out on the road back to the country where his sweetheart Fanny lives. He is accompanied by the parson Abraham Adams — one of the great comic figures in English fiction, a man of genuine goodness and complete impracticality — and the novel follows their picaresque adventures across England. Fielding's narrative voice is as entertaining as anything in Tom Jones, and Joseph Andrews, though less ambitious than its successor, is more focused and perhaps more purely pleasurable.