Joseph Andrews is Fielding's first novel, and although directed against Samuel richardson's Pamela which was a great success, it is far from being a simple parody. To cite Fielding himself 'the fable consists of a series of separate adventures...All tending to one great end'- namely, the opposition of integrity and Christian decency to corruption and selfishness. The novel rapidly develops an original shape of its own, and extends the range of the novel form by its refusal to depend on exclusive and extensive identification with the sensibility of any central character. It is an early masterpiece of the genre — comic in its characterization, yet seriously enquiring in its vignettes of contemporary behaviour. While displaying Fielding's great comic gifts, the novel demonstrates his concern for the corruption of contemporary morality, religion, politics and literature. It depicts his presentation of love as charity, as friendship, and in its sexual sense.
Henry Fielding (1707-54), novelist and dramatist, was born of aristocratic descent at Sharpham Park, Somerset. He was educated privately at first and then at Eton, and Leyden University in Holland where he studied law. In 1725 he attempted to abduct an heiress and was bound over to keep the peace. He then went to London, where, in 1728, he published a satirical poem, The Masquerade, and a comedy, Love in Several Masques. From 1728 to 1729 he was a student of literature at Leyden University, returning to London in the autumn of the latter year. Between 1729 and 1737 he wrote some twenty five assorted dramas, largely in the form of farces, ballad operas, burlesques, and a series of topical satires. His satires and burlesques attacked the Walpole Government and provoked the Licensing Act of 1737 which set up a censorship of the stage. This curtailed his career as a dramatist, and he turned to the less inhibitting form of the novel. Joseph Andrews was published in 1742. It was followed a year later by Jonathan Wild, the history of a superman of crime who ironically represents Sir Robert Walpole.
