Joseph Andrews
Plot summary
Book I
The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of ten years he found himself tending to animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. It was in proving his worth as a horseman that he first caught the eye of Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Booby, who employed him (now seventeen) as her footman.
After the death of Sir Thomas, Joseph finds that his Lady’s affections have redoubled as she offers herself to him in her chamber while on a trip to London. In a scene analogous to many of Pamela’s refusals of Mr B in Richardson’s novel, however, Lady Booby finds that Joseph’s Christian commitment to chastity before marriage is unwavering. After suffering the Lady’s fury, Joseph dispatches a letter to his sister very much typical of Pamela’s anguished missives in her own novel. The Lady calls him once again to her chamber and makes one last withering attempt at seduction before dismissing him from both his job and his lodgings.
With Joseph setting out from London by moonlight, the narrator introduces the reader to the heroine of the novel, Fanny Goodwill. A poor illiterate girl of ‘extraordinary beauty’ (I, xi) now living with a farmer close to Lady Booby’s parish, she and Joseph had grown ever closer since their childhood, before their local parson and mentor, Abraham Adams, recommended that they postpone marriage until they have the means to live comfortably.
On his way to see Fanny, Joseph is mugged and laid up in a nearby inn where, by dint of circumstance, he is reconciled with Adams, who is on his way to London to sell three volumes of his sermons. The thief, too, is found and brought to the inn (only to escape later that night), and Joseph is reunited with his possessions. Adams and Joseph catch up with each other, and the parson, in spite of his own poverty, offers his last 9s 3½d to
Book I
The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of ten years he found himself tending to animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. It was in proving his worth as a horseman that he first caught the eye of Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Booby, who employed him (now seventeen) as her footman.
After the death of Sir Thomas, Joseph finds that his Lady’s affections have redoubled as she offers herself to him in her chamber while on a trip to London. In a scene analogous to many of Pamela’s refusals of Mr B in Richardson’s novel, however, Lady Booby finds that Joseph’s Christian commitment to chastity before marriage is unwavering. After suffering the Lady’s fury, Joseph dispatches a letter to his sister very much typical of Pamela’s anguished missives in her own novel. The Lady calls him once again to her chamber and makes one last withering attempt at seduction before dismissing him from both his job and his lodgings.
With Joseph setting out from London by moonlight, the narrator introduces the reader to the heroine of the novel, Fanny Goodwill. A poor illiterate girl of ‘extraordinary beauty’ (I, xi) now living with a farmer close to Lady Booby’s parish, she and Joseph had grown ever closer since their childhood, before their local parson and mentor, Abraham Adams, recommended that they postpone marriage until they have the means to live comfortably.
On his way to see Fanny, Joseph is mugged and laid up in a nearby inn where, by dint of circumstance, he is reconciled with Adams, who is on his way to London to sell three volumes of his sermons. The thief, too, is found and brought to the inn (only to escape later that night), and Joseph is reunited with his possessions. Adams and Joseph catch up with each other, and the parson, in spite of his own poverty, offers his last 9s 3½d to