Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
A Short Biographical Sketch of the Author:
Henry Fielding was born on April 22, 1707, at his grandparents' estate in Somerset, England. He was the first of seven children born to Edmund Fielding, a career military officer, and Sarah Gould Fielding, daughter of a wealthy judge.
Fielding spent his childhood on his parents' large farm in Dorset and was tutored at home. His mother died when he was ten, and his father sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, Lady Gould. Edmund Fielding soon married a widow and set about squandering his children's inheritance. Lady Gould filed suit for legal custody of the children and won. In the course of these events, Henry became willful and defiant. His father sent him to Eton in 1719, where he studied Greek, Latin, and the classics. He remained there until 1724 and later briefly attended the University of Leyden in Holland.
Fielding began his writing career as a playwright; his first play, Love in Several Masques, was performed in London in 1728. He soon became a successful playwright and also published poems and essays.
In 1734, Fielding married Charlotte Cradock, a beautiful woman who would later be the inspiration for Sophia Western in Tom Jones. They had five children, four of whom would die quite young before Charlotte died in 1744.
Fielding's play The Historical Register, performed in 1737, satirized Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole so acutely that the government shut down the theatre where Fielding was working. It became impossible for him to earn a living writing plays, so he went to law school and was admitted to the bar in 1740. In addition to practicing law, Fielding cofounded a political and cultural journal called Champion.
The year 1740 also saw the publication of Pamela, a novel by Samuel Richardson that soon became the first bestseller of all time. Fielding felt so strongly that the novel was overrated that he wrote a parody of it, Shamela. This launched his fiction career. Another, more ambitious parody of the same novel, Joseph Andrews, appeared in 1742.
In 1747, Fielding married Mary Daniel, who had been his first wife's maid and who was pregnant with Fielding's child. They would have five children together.
Fielding continued a successful law career as he also continued to write popular novels. He was appointed magistrate (a government position similar to that of judge) for Middlesex in 1749, the year Tom Jones was published and became a bestseller. His last novel, Amelia, was published in 1751, but he continued to write for a daily newspaper and nonfiction treatises such as Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor (1753).
In early 1754, Fielding became very ill, resigned as a magistrate, and sailed for Portugal, where he hoped to recover. Although he did seem to be regaining his health and began planning to write a history of Portugal, he died in Lisbon on October 8, 1754.
A Brief Introduction to Joseph Andrews:
The full title of Henry Fielding's first novel Joseph Andrews is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. It was among the first novels in the English language. The novel appeared in the year 1742, two years after Richardson's publication of Pamela. During the period Fielding was suffering from financial hardships and his uncomfortable financial circumstances led him to choose to write a novel for material gain. At the same time, it was also prompted by a desire to present a new point of view on the art of writing a novel. Fielding's views differed radically from Richardson's. Joseph Andrews was, in a way, a consequence of Richardson's Pamela. The novel beings as a direct parody of Richardson's Pamela, with Joseph (Pamela's brother) fleeing from attempted seduction by his employer, Lady Booby. This turnabout, with the man being seduced by the woman, is a good illustration of the occasionally riotous and earthy sense of humor evident in Fielding. Halfway through the novel, Fielding seems to forget he is writing a satire on Pamela and writes an excellent novel in its own light. The novel represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of eighteenth-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.
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