Joseph Andrews

Fielding began the novel explicitly as a parody of Samuel Richardson's wildly popular Pamela, in which a servant girl's persistent virtue against her master's advances is eventually rewarded with marriage into his class, and Fielding's opening joke is structural: Joseph Andrews is Pamela's brother, footman to Lady Booby, and finds himself fending off his own employer's advances in almost exactly the same terms Pamela used to fend off Mr. B, right down to protesting his virtue in language that reads as absurd coming from a young man rather than a young woman. The gender reversal exposes, more effectively than direct argument could, how much of Pamela's celebrated virtue was really about the marketability of female chastity rather than any general moral principle Richardson claimed to be defending.

Parson Adams, the genuinely good, comically impractical clergyman who accompanies Joseph on the road, becomes the novel's real center of gravity well before the Pamela parody has run its course, and Fielding uses Adams's total obliviousness to social hierarchy and self-interest, he'll fight for a stranger's honor as readily as for a friend's and never once calculates what it costs him, as the positive moral standard the surrounding cast of vain innkeepers, corrupt magistrates, and self-serving clergymen keep failing to meet. The novel widens from a targeted joke about one bestseller into a broader picaresque satire of English social hypocrisy precisely because Adams, unlike Joseph, was never conceived as a parody of anyone; he's Fielding's own invention, and the book gets more interesting exactly when it stops needing Richardson's plot to react against.

Fielding resolves Joseph and Fanny's marriage obstacle with one of the eighteenth-century novel's most reliable devices, a set of birthmarks and a peddler's testimony revealing that neither is who the household assumed, but he stages the revelation with enough comic excess, false starts, contradictory claims, a scene that nearly reveals the wrong relationship entirely, that the convention reads as much mocked as used. It's consistent with Fielding's whole method in the novel: rather than simply avoiding the sentimental machinery Richardson and later novelists relied on, he keeps the machinery running while making its gears visible, letting readers enjoy the plot's neat resolution and its absurdity in the same breath.